Instagram's help center says you can put five websites on a profile. That has been true since April 2023. A lot of the tutorials still circulating were written when the cap was one, so people keep asking why a second link "isn't showing up" when the field for it is sitting right there under Edit profile → Links.
TikTok is the opposite problem. There is no count. Per TikTok's own support page, the website field does not appear at all until you have 1,000 followers or a Verified Business Account. Below that, rearranging bio text will not conjure a link. The limit is a condition, not a number.
YouTube sits in the middle: up to 14 channel profile links on the About tab (YouTube Help). Links inside a regular video description are clickable once advanced features are on. The same URLs pasted into a Shorts description or a Shorts comment are not. YouTube documents that split; it still trips people because "put it in the description" sounds like one rule.
I went back to each platform's help pages on 19 September 2026 instead of trusting search snippets. Snippets cache. Help pages get edited. The two disagree for years sometimes.
What that actually changes
If you have fewer than five destinations and you live on Instagram, the native field probably does the job. You do not need a second product in the stack just to host a list of URLs.
The gap that is still real:
- Instagram will not tell you which of those five links got tapped unless you wrap each one yourself.
- Reordering them is five separate edits, not a drag handle.
- None of those native fields exist outside the app, so there is nothing to put on a printed card or in an email signature.
- TikTok's 1,000-follower gate is the sharper one. Anyone under that line has no native link at all, which is the original job a bio-link page was built for.
How to audit your own setup
Start by asking whether the platform is giving you a count or a condition.
- A count (Instagram 5, YouTube 14) means you are choosing which links make the cut.
- A condition (TikTok 1,000 followers) means the field does not exist yet. No amount of bio-text gymnastics will make it appear.
Instagram states the number in the first sentence of the help article. TikTok hides the threshold in the "important things to know" list under the how-to steps, which is why people skim past it.
I work on Nameplate, a one-page site for portfolios, QR codes, and digital business cards. We do not cap how many links sit on a page, free included. We also do not scrape these platform limits automatically — if TikTok drops the follower gate next quarter, someone has to notice and rewrite this by hand. That is the honest version.
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