7 Fastest URL Shorteners Ranked By Pingdom (PICTURES)

Most Internet users have a serious need for speed.

If you're one of them, Pingdom's ranking of the fastest "open" URL shorteners is not to be missed.

The website monitoring company set out to fact check Google's claim that with Goo.gl, its URL shortener, it planned to create "the stablest, most secure, and fastest URL Shortener on the web."

Pingdom explains it was "primarily concerned with the reliability and performance of shortened URLs. How much overhead do the different URL shorteners add, and do they always work? What you are ultimately comparing is the time it takes to go to a site directly versus the time it takes to go to that site via a URL shortener."

Application-specific URL shorteners were not included in the testing, which compared only "open" URL shorteners. Pingdom outlines how it ranked the shorteners: "Since we used the Pingdom monitoring network, the continuous tests were spread out over 25 locations distributed over North America and Europe. We performed tests every minute for 15 days. For those of you counting, that means that the numbers we'll show you are the result of 21,600 tests per URL shortener."

Pingdom found that the average page load time for the URL shorteners varied slightly depending on the geographic region in which it was used (For example, Bit.ly's average page load overhead, or "the extra time a URL shortener adds when accessing a site," according to Pingdom, was between 100 and 200 ms in North America, but around 400 ms in Europe).

Is Goo.gl really the fastest URL shortener in town? Find out what the fastest URL shortener is in the slideshow below.