link rel='shortlink

A shortlink is just a way to provide a shorter version of the URL of any page, in case you want to share the URL but you need it to be as short as possible.

For example, if a page URL is http://www.mysite.com/something/this-post-is-very-awesome-because-its-cool, then the shortlink could be (automatically) generated into something like http://wp.me/p5IhCV (just an example).

That URL is much shorter (but will lead to the same page as the long URL), and so can be used when you want to share the URL on something like Twitter, where the number of characters is limited.

So whenever you would share a page, some services (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) check if there’s a shortlink in the source code, and will then use that URL in the post instead of the longer, original one.

It’s not just for a user, actually.

Let’s say you would share the URL on Twitter. You type the long URL in your tweet. Then Twitter will do a quick visit of the page and check if there’s a shortlink, and then display that short URL in the Tweet.

So you might type this:

Hey everyone, check out this super duper awesome page, I highly recommend it! http://www.mysite.com/something/this-post-is-very-awesome-because-its-cool

Way too long for a tweet. Won’t fit, cause you only have 140 characters available. But Twitter will then actually display it like this, which WILL fit:

Hey everyone, check out this super duper awesome page, I highly recommend it! http://wp.me/p5IhCV

Note: this is not 100% technically correct, it is just to show you how you can benefit from having a shortlink. You can remove it if you like, but it doesn’t do any damage, so why not just keep it in?

You should remove it if you don’t want to confuse Search engine Bots.

You can do it manually by adding this to your functions.php

remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wp_shortlink_wp_head’, 10, 0 );
remove_action( ‘template_redirect’, ‘wp_shortlink_header’, 11, 0 );
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wlwmanifest_link’ );

Thanks