Broken Link Checker for WordPress
Sometimes, links get broken. A page is deleted, a subdirectory forgotten, a site moved to a different domain. Most likely many of your blog posts contain links. It is almost inevitable that over time some of them will lead to a “404 Not Found” error page. Obviously you don’t want your readers to be annoyed by clicking a link that leads nowhere. You can check the links yourself but that might be quite a task if you have a lot of posts. You could use your webserver’s stats but that only works for local links.
So I’ve made a plugin for WordPress that will check your posts (and pages), looking for broken links, and let you know if any are found.
Download it now! (40 KB)
Note : This page, and the feature list below are slightly out of date as a major update has been released recently (see details). I’ll get around to updating this page eventually.
Features
- Checks your posts (and pages) in the background (whenever the WP admin panel is open ).
- Detects links that don’t work and missing images. Checks both internal and outbound links.
- Notifies you on the Dashboard if any problems are found.
- Link checking intervals can be configured.
- New/modified posts are checked ASAP.
The broken links show up in the Manage -> Broken Links tab. If any invalid URLs are found a notification will also show up in the sidebar on the Dashboard.
The Broken Links tab displays a list of invalid URLs found along with the relevant posts and the anchor text of the links. “View” and “Edit Post” do exactly what they say and “Discard” will remove the message about a broken link, but not the link itself (so it will show up again later unless you fix it; this plugin doesn’t modify your links).
By default all old posts/links are re-checked every 72 hours, or you can set a different time period.
Notes (Semi-Technical)
I realize there’s a lot of features that could be added to improve this plugin considerably. However, this release is intended to “test the waters” and see if there’s demand for a plugin like this, so I only implemented the most basic functions. The plugin has been upgraded to be slightly beyond “basic” 
I thought about using WP’s pseudo-cron to run the link checker by schedule and decided against it. AFAIK the cronjobs execute when a page is requested; since this plugin does some lengthy processing it may increase page load times unacceptably when used in this manner. That’s why I set it to run the checks asynchronously (AJAX) and invisibly in the admin panel.
Installation
Just like any other WordPress plugin -
- Download (see below).
- Unzip.
- Upload the broken-link-checker folder to you wp-content/plugins directory.
- Activate the plugin in the Plugins tab.
Upgrading
- Deactivate the plugin (important!).
- Do steps 1.-3. from “Installation”.
- Upload the broken-link-checker folder to you wp-content/plugins directory.
- Re-activate the plugin in the Plugins tab.
Download
Version 0.5.3 : broken-link-checker.zip (40 Kb)
Requirements
- WordPress 2.7 or later
- MySQL 4.1 or later
Starting with version 0.5 this plugin is only compatible with WordPress 2.7 and up. Older versions (e.g. ver. 0.4.14) should work with WP 2.1 – 2.6.x.
very usefull plugin, thanks a lot!
Also- need a ability of bulk deleting of broken links
Version 0.8 has this ability – see the “Bulk Actions” drop-down on the Tools -> Broken Links page.
[...] hab gerade ein total nützliches Wordpress Plugin gefunden. Der Broken Link Checker überprüft alle Links, ob sie noch funktionieren und sortiert dann nach broken (404) oder moved [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker [...]
I submitted a thread at the WP support forum, but thought I’d better mention it here as well. Activating this plugin immediately killed my blog (wp 2.9.1). Both admin and front end went down immediately and never came back until I finally ftp’d into the server and deleted the plugin files.
Now my question is this:
Are the tables in the database that begin with wp_blc_ for this plugin? If so, I’ll delete those tables, since they obviously didn’t get deleted when I had to unceremoniously delete the plugin files via ftp. Anything else I should deal with to totally clean up?
Yes, the wp_blc_ tables are for this plugin. There’s also the “wsblc_options” option that it creates in the wp_options table when it’s activated.
[...] Visit plugin site [...]
For some reason this plugin is calling active (healthy) links from yelp.com and archive.org broken. Any known reasons for this?
[...] Broken Link Checker : This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. [...]
Some sites intentionally block any HTTP requests that look like they were sent by an automated script. Links to such sites will work normally when you click them, but be reported as broken by BLC.
You can click the “Details” link for each (supposedly) broken link to get more information about why it was marked as broken.
I am using this plugin from past 2 months… never had a problem. Its really awesome and very useful.
I like to ask… are you going to add any new features so that this plugin can also check broken links of ( rapidshare.com, megaupload.com ). This type of link checker has already been developed by phpbb forums – http://forum.zomgstuff.net/showthread.php?t=12979
If this can be also added in the feature… it will be like universal link checker !
I hope it will be added soon. Cheers and Thanks a lot !
This has been suggested before and it is already on my “add that someday” list. How soon it gets implemented will depend on the results of the user feedback survey (which you’ve probably already seen) – the features that were requested by the largest number of users will probably get done first.
I’ll post the survey results on Monday.
I don’t get it: Broken Link Checker keeps reporting a bunch of links as broken and NONE of the them actually are. It’s frustrating because it draws a line through the words of a link that it considers to be broken, yet the links aren’t broken. So I wind up having a bunch of lines drawn through the words of working links. Why is it doing this? How can I stop it? Maybe add a feature where you can choose not to strike out the words even when Broken Link Checker thinks that the link is broken?
You can disable the strike-through by un-checking the “Apply class=”broken_link” to broken links” option in Settings -> Link Checker.
As for the false positives, see my previous comment above.
This plugin completely disabled my site also Donna. I have ftp deleted the plugin but have yet to see my site come back on. Any suggestions on how to get my site up and running again.
I am now headed to my database files to delete them but I am not an experienced user with them, so wish e luck.
My site is up and running again. I just had to republish my homepage fro some strange reason. It’s unfortunate I couldn’t use this plugin, but you know, stuff happens.
Do you think maybe it’s a server issue? I use
Apache version 2.2.13 (Unix)
I’m sorry about that, but I’ve never been able to quite figure out why this happens. Still, I would guess it’s something to do with your server. How loaded is it? Are you running on shared hosting, or something else?
With WP 2.9 and the previous version of BLC, I had no problems. At some point since I upgraded WP to 2.9.1 and the plugin to the latest version, I am getting tons of false positives. Every single one is an internal link to either a subdomain of my site or the main site. I get the following message for each link:
1. Log : === First try : 0 (No response) ===
Trying a second time with different settings…
=== Second try : 0 (No response) ===
Link is broken.
(Most likely the connection timed out or the domain doesn’t exist.)
Any ideas?
You could always try downgrading to an older version to see if it helps. Though I doubt it would, as the he last three versions of BLC didn’t change anything in the checking algorithm. Still, it might be worth a try anyway, as it would help isolate the problem.
Downgraded to 1.7.1 with no luck. Strange that the server isn’t responding to internal requests. Where should I start looking?
Thanks for an otherwise great plugin though!
[...] Broken Link Checker. This plugin continually checks all the links (past and present) on your blog entries and validates that no links are broken. I have over 600 links in my blog thus far, so this is a great plugin for me (this post alone has 29 links). Sometimes pages disappear and links in your old posts no longer work; this plugin keeps you from having to constantly re-check all of your links. It runs in the background and is not visible to readers of your blog. [...]
White Shadow.
I’m thinking it is my server. I’ve had great success with my host but it does seem to lack in some areas. For example. For both my sites I used a program called Xenu to check for broken links and to check for google trying to index files that don’t exist; the first site it worked and I was able to pinpoint the problem, but then I could not access my site for about ten minutes after.
I ran it on the site I tried to install your plugin this morning and watched my server load. (after I told xenu to go easier on the threads) Within three minutes my server went from a green check to a red check, telling me the load doubled.
It’s unfortunate because I love my host, but I get the feeling with my traffic growing everyday, I am going to be forced to eventually look for a better host. I use Hosting24.
That’s what I suspected. I think I’ll eventually add an option to suspend link checking if the server load goes over a user-specified threshold. Perhaps that will help with these issues.
Ok, then we are waiting for the result day !
[...] Link Checker Survey Results Last week I invited everyone who uses my Broken Link Checker plugin to answer a user feedback survey. The survey consisted of 11 questions covering a number of [...]
Just to let people know, I was getting a lot of false positives until I installed the CURL library. This is because most of my links were Apture links and not direct links. Since I installed the CURL library on my server, this plugin has worked like a charm. It is extremely useful.
Also, anyone who can’t figure out how to disable the automatic strike-through via the options really has no business running a blog. If your PHP, CURL, etc. are up to date, then you won’t have any problems with this plugin.
Great Plugin!!!!!!
This saved me days of work.
[...] Broken Link Checker [...]
[...] require more man power. Obviously, no one has patience to do it too. A plugin by Janis Elsts named Broken Link Checker helps you automatically find broken links. The plugin [...]
Invaluable plugin but it flags Apture links as broken. I don’t see a way around this.
http://apture.com