How many links should be in your bio?

Three to five links covers most people. Here is when to deviate.

The distinction that matters in that table is between options and intents. A restaurant page with book, menu, and directions is not offering three options, it is serving three different visitors who each know what they came for. A creator page with eight links is genuinely asking one visitor to choose, which is a completely different demand.

A bio page is read on a phone, in an in-app browser, in a few seconds, usually while doing something else. Under those conditions the top of the screen is worth disproportionately more than the rest, for three reasons that compound.

1. The fold is small. After an avatar, a name, and a bio line, a phone screen shows two or three link rows. Everything else requires a deliberate scroll.
2. Scrolling is a decision. On a page whose entire purpose is to be passed through quickly, "look further" is a request most visitors decline.
3. Satisfaction stops the search. A visitor who finds something plausible in the first two rows taps it and never evaluates rows three through eight. Those links are not losing a competition, they are not entering one.

This is why the top slot is worth arguing about and the sixth is close to decoration. It is also why adding a link is never free: it does not just add its own row, it pushes every row below it further down the page.

Cutting is harder than it sounds because every link on your page is there for a reason you remember. Three tests, applied in order, resolve most of it.

The job test

Every link should have exactly one job, stated as a verb: get them listening, get them on the list, get them booked, get them buying. If two links have the same job, keep the one with the better rate and delete the other. If a link has no job you can state in a verb, it is decoration.

The 90 day test

If a link has had a meaningful number of views and almost no clicks over 90 days, it is not underperforming, it is finished. Archive it. The exception is a link with a genuine seasonal cycle, like tour tickets or a tax deadline, which should be scheduled rather than permanent.

The redundancy test

Social icons duplicating the platform your visitor just came from, a "website" link whose homepage is a slower version of your bio page, and a Linktree-style link to another link page all fail this. Every hop you add loses people.

• Keep: the thing your latest post promised, the offer, the list, one evergreen proof point.
• Demote to icons: social profiles.
• Archive: anything with 90 days of views and no clicks, last year's campaign, and the second link doing the first link's job.

The default order most people use is chronological by when they added the link, which is the one ordering guaranteed to be wrong. Use this instead.

1. What today's traffic was promised. If your latest video said "link in bio for the recipe," the recipe is first. This slot changes constantly and that is the point.
2. The thing that makes money or grows the list. Second position still gets real attention, and this is the link with the highest value per tap.
3. The evergreen that earns taps. Whatever has the best per-link rate over the last month and is not seasonal.
4. Everything else, by rate. Not by how much you like it.
5. Socials, as icons. Small, at the bottom, out of the way.

One refinement, if you can see referrer data: the correct order is different per source. A page that is well ordered for newsletter readers is frequently badly ordered for the platform sending most of its traffic, because those two audiences arrived from different content with different promises. If you cannot split by source, you are ordering the page for an average visitor who does not exist.

The three-to-five rule applies to a flat list of buttons. It stops applying when the page has structure, because structure changes what you are asking the visitor to do.

• Sections with headings let a visitor skip an entire group in one glance. A podcast page with "listen" (six players), "support" (two links), and "connect" (icons) is asking for one decision, not eleven.
• Grids compress many small items into the vertical space of one row. Good for socials, episodes, and product tiles. Bad for anything needing a sentence of explanation.
• Tabs hide whole categories until asked for. Useful for genuinely separate audiences, like a musician with a fan page and a booking page.
• Video sections earn their space when the video is the product. They cost load time, so use one, not four.

The test is unchanged: how many decisions is the page asking for? Eleven links in three labelled groups is three decisions. Eleven links in a list is eleven.

Everything above assumes you will redo it. The correct first link changes every time you publish. The best-performing evergreen changes seasonally. A link that earned its position in March may be dead by June.

In practice almost nobody revisits their bio page on a schedule. People set it up carefully once, then post for eighteen months while the page slowly drifts out of date. The page is not badly designed, it is correctly designed for a moment that has passed.

There are two ways to close that gap. The first is a calendar reminder every Monday, and if you will genuinely keep it, that works and costs nothing. The second is to let the order follow behaviour, which is what we built. Links are scored on recency-weighted click-through with a 14 day half-life, so last month's winner fades rather than squatting. New links get a small allowance that decays over about a week so they can be discovered at all. Pinned links always stay on top, because the owner should outrank the algorithm. And under roughly 50 views in 90 days it does nothing at all, because reordering from noise is worse than leaving it alone.

Related reading: why nobody is clicking, what dead links cost you, and the comparison of which tools can even show you per-link rates.