How to Customize Your LinkedIn Profile URL

To customize your LinkedIn URL, open your profile, click "Edit public profile & URL" in the right-hand column, then click the pencil next to your current URL under "Edit your custom URL". Type the new ending — for example linkedin.com/in/janesmith — and save. On the app, the same option sits under your profile's settings for public profile.

That is the whole job, and it takes about forty seconds. The reason it is worth a guide is everything around it: which characters LinkedIn accepts, what happens to the old link, and what to do when someone with your exact name got there first, probably in 2009.

The rules for a custom LinkedIn URL

Limits as described in LinkedIn's help centre at time of writing. LinkedIn does change these occasionally, so if the editor rejects something, the editor is right.

Step by step on desktop

1. Step 1

   Open your own profile

   Click your photo in the top bar, then "View profile". You need to be on your own profile, not someone else's — the option will not appear otherwise.

2. Step 2

   Find "Edit public profile & URL"

   It sits at the top of the right-hand column. If you are on a narrow window, the column may have moved below your profile content; scroll down.

3. Step 3

   Click the pencil under "Edit your custom URL"

   You will see your current URL with the random suffix — something like /in/jane-smith-4b7a21193. Only the part after /in/ is editable.

4. Step 4

   Type the new ending and save

   If it is taken, LinkedIn tells you immediately. If it saves, the new URL works straight away. Copy it somewhere sensible before you close the tab.

What happens to your old URL

Your old URL stops pointing at you. LinkedIn does not promise a permanent redirect, so any link you have pasted into an email signature, a CV, a conference badge or a website footer is now a link to nowhere — or, eventually, to someone else, because released URLs can be claimed by other members.

This is the part people skip. Before you change the URL, make a quick list of where the old one lives. After you change it, update those places the same day. It is a ten-minute job now and an embarrassing one later, when a recruiter clicks your CV link and lands on a "profile not available" page.

What to pick when your name is taken

If /in/firstnamelastname is gone, resist the urge to add your birth year or a string of numbers. You are trying to remove randomness, not replace it with a different flavour of randomness.

Better options, roughly in order: add a middle initial (janeasmith), reverse the order (smithjane), add a short professional word (janesmithdesign, janesmithcfo — but only if you will still do that job in five years), or use a name you are actually known by professionally. Avoid hyphens and underscores; LinkedIn will not accept most symbols anyway, and the ones people try to sneak in make the URL harder to say out loud.

Share the clean version, not the tracked one

When you copy your profile link from the LinkedIn app, it often comes with tracking parameters attached — a question mark followed by a tail of utm codes and share identifiers. It still works, but it looks messy in a CV and some of those tails expire or misbehave.

The clean form is simply https://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname with nothing after it. Delete everything from the question mark onwards before you paste it anywhere permanent. We are building a profile URL cleaner that does this in one paste; until it ships, the manual trim works just as well.

Custom URL checklist

• Listed every place the old URL appears before changing it
• New URL uses only letters and numbers, 3–100 characters
• Readable when spoken aloud — no numbers unless unavoidable
• Not tied to a job title or employer you might leave
• Updated CV, email signature, website and other profiles the same day
• Shared links trimmed of everything after the question mark

Does a custom URL help you get found?

Marginally, and not in the way people hope. A custom URL does not move you up LinkedIn's own search results; those are driven by your name, headline, experience and connections. In Google, a name-based URL is a small relevance signal for searches of your name, and it looks more trustworthy in a results page than a hashed string.

The real benefit is human. A clean URL fits on a business card, survives being read aloud on a call, and makes you look like someone who has opened their settings at least once. That is a low bar, but plenty of profiles still do not clear it.