December 8, 2025, 10:25 am | Read time: 3 minutes
Billions of people send messages on WhatsApp every day. These aren’t just text messages. You can also send photos, videos, links, or voice recordings. In the heat of the moment, it’s easy to send the wrong message. That’s when the delete function comes in handy. However, deleting URLs on WhatsApp can sometimes be a bit tricky. Here are two ways to do it quickly and easily.
Deleting URLs on WhatsApp isn’t so simple
It doesn’t always have to be a written essay or a spoken presentation. If you find something online that you want to quickly share with others, you can just send a link, or even shorter: just a URL. But if you accidentally send the wrong URL or to the wrong recipient, you should delete the message.
Normally, it’s very easy to delete messages on WhatsApp. However, deleting a simple URL on WhatsApp can prove difficult. Ideally, you should be able to hold down the message with the URL to select the delete option. Unfortunately, this can trigger another command. I recently tried this on my Android smartphone and almost gave up because the options to copy or open appeared instead:
In the attempt to delete the URL on WhatsApp, valuable time passed, and I started to worry that someone might open the link before I could delete it. After all, the person shouldn’t see what I had mistakenly sent, and it would have been quite embarrassing. Don’t worry, it was family-friendly content.
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Deleting URLs on WhatsApp with marked messages
After some trial and error, I discovered a workaround to delete a simple URL on WhatsApp. If there are other messages in the chat, it’s advisable to first mark one of them.
Once that’s done, you can directly select additional messages, including the URL messages. Then, remove the mark from the other message so that only the URL remains. You can then delete it as usual.
Correctly marking a URL message
The instruction to simply mark the message for deletion is a bit misleading, as you can see with URLs. While it works this way for text messages and other types, you shouldn’t click directly on the message for URL posts.
Instead, you should click in the empty space before or after a message. On WhatsApp, messages never take up the full width of the chat window. Depending on the sender, they are more left- or right-aligned, leaving some space on the other side. Hold down briefly here to mark the message in the respective line.
After that, you can delete the URL on WhatsApp as usual. If only I had known this earlier, it would have saved me time and nerves. By the way, the problem seems to be less of an issue on iPhones.