A WhatsApp link and QR code for your number

A wa.me link wants the country code followed by the number, as digits only. No plus sign, no spaces, no brackets, no dashes, and no 0 in front of the local number. People write numbers with all of those, so the tool strips them and shows you what it ended up with and which country the first digits belong to. If that country is not the one you meant, the country code is wrong.

The tool also warns when a number does not fit its country: numbers that start with 1 have ten digits after it, and Indian numbers have ten digits after 91. It cannot know whether a number is registered on WhatsApp, so always press Open to test.

Anything you put in the message box is added to the link after ?text=, percent-encoded: a space becomes %20, a new line %0A, & becomes %26, # becomes %23 and + becomes %2B. Without that, an & or # in your message would cut it off. The person who opens the link sees the message in the chat box and can edit it or send it as it is. Nothing is sent until they press send.

• Make it say what they want: “Hi, I’d like to book a table for 4 on Saturday” beats “Hello”.
• Put a keyword at the start if you sort incoming chats, such as “[Reel] Is the course still open?”, so you can tell which post sent them.
• Keep it short. A long message makes a denser QR code that is harder to scan from a distance.
• Never put anything private in it. The text sits in the link and in the QR code in plain form.

Paste the link into your Instagram bio, your link-in-bio page, a Facebook post or an event description. On a printed poster or a shop window the QR code does the same job for people standing in front of it. For a business the link is the shortest route from “I saw your post” to a conversation.

Tip: DMFast works with Instagram professional accounts and Facebook Pages. It does not connect to WhatsApp, so this link is just a way to send people to a chat you answer yourself. To answer comments and DMs on Instagram and Messenger automatically, that is what DMFast does.

For the exact current rules of WhatsApp’s own links, see its Help Center article “How to use click to chat”. WhatsApp can change them, and its article is the source to trust over this page.