If you’ve just activated Social Warfare or just added your Bitly username and API key, you may notice that your posts and pages aren’t showing the Bitly links right away.
Take a deep breath; this is expected.
The plugin only checks the Bitly settings and fetches the Bitly links when the plugin data cache has expired. If you activate Bitly, the plugin will not attempt to update every link on every post across a website. Can you imagine how many API requests that would throw out all at the same time?
(A lot. And that would be not be good for your server.)
So instead, we only fetch those Bitly links on the regular cache schedule from which the rest of the plugin works.
Since, in 99% of cases, these credentials will be set up only once and then never looked at again, the delayed population of the short links will only occur once at the very beginning and then never again.
So rest assured, your Bitly links will show up; it just might take 1-6 hours, depending on the age of the post/page.
Can’t wait for the cache?
If you’re eager to get a specific post or page assigned a Bitly link, then you can cheat a little bit. Here’s what you need to do:
- Go to the post/page editor.
- Click the Update button to update the post/page.
And that should be it! The next time that page is loaded, it will trigger the cache reset, and your Bitly link(s) will be generated.