I recently decided to abandon YOURLS as my shortlink solution, opting instead to handle short URLs entirely within WordPress. This choice is not a reflection on YOURLS–it’s still a great product–but rather was borne from my use case for shortlinks; I concluded that, since I only used them in conjunction with WordPress, an external shortlink service was excessive.
While WordPress has provided a native shortlinks feature since the 3.0 release, it uses query strings rather than pretty permalinks. This means that the shortlink for this post would be https://ethitter.com/?p=6360. It’s not the prettiest URL, nor will many systems cache that request; as a result, each shortlink that’s followed would load all of WordPress just to perform a redirect to the post’s full URL. Unsatisfied with Core’s handling but also unwilling to retain YOURLS, I wrote a small WordPress plugin to address my needs.