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Note : This page, and the feature list below are slightly out of date as a major update has been released recently (see details).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.
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‘Ello,
All of the outbound links on my site are redirected for tracking purposes, I was wondering if this plug-in will detect if the link they get redirected to is broken or just check if the page they are originally sent to that does the redirecting is broken
The plugin should follow the redirect and check the actual page. The only situation where it might not work is if you’re running PHP in safe mode or have the open_basedir directive set.
‘Ello,
That’s brilliant I’ll be sure to install this plug-in then, this will be so incredibly helpful to the site account managers at my work and make my job easier to.
Thanks for the quick reply.
I am from Russia, and I try to use your plugin today, and I like it!!! Thanks!!!
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I really don’t like that the plugin automatically started checking my links. I activated the plugin and then clicked on the Settings link to go set things up, and the plugin started scanning on its own. I never got to even set the options because as soon as I saw it had a mind of its own, I uninstalled and deleted it. If you get that fixed, let me know, because I’d really like to use the plugin.
This is not a bug, it’s a feature
However, I’ll keep your suggestion in mind and might add an option to only check links on-request in a future version.
Salut,
first I want to thank you for your great work.
The Broken Link Checker is a really useful plug-in!
I wonder whether it’s possible to mute broken links in the “Broken Links Admin Tab”. There are cases in which I would like to keep the link but also a the note that it’s broken. So “exclude” didn’t work for me – at least it looked like it (Did I do something wrong??)
Another possibility would be to add an optional class for unlinked links. Such as “class=”removed_link”, like you offered for the broken links.
Just some ideas
no request…
When you say “mute”, do you mean you’d like the link to show up as broken in the post (i.e. have the broken-link CSS class) but hide it from the “Broken Links” table in the admin panel? That’s not possible in the current version. I’m also not entirely sure it would be very useful, but I’ll add it to my idea list.
I’ll add a CSS class for unlinked links in the next release (or possibly the one after that, in case the next one happens to be a bugfix-only update).
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I just installed the new link checker just an moment ago. I must say it’s an very awesome piece of software that will be great to have for any active blogger.
Broken links on your blog is not an good thing. You lose an lot of creditability with readers, this broken link checkers will solve those problems.
Antonio Coleman ‘TrafficColeman” Signing Off
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reg 884:
Hello White Shadow,
So thanks a lot for including it into a future release 
yes, that’s what I meant with “mute” – but I guess a CSS-class for unlinked links would be the better fix for the problem anyway
Have a great week!
thaks for this plugin i’ll tray it today great thanks
I just recently found out about cURL, I need to get more information on “where” to put this file after I have the latest version of it. And if it is in zip format, what is the true name of the file.
cURL is a PHP library, a server-side thing. If you don’t know how to update/install it, chances are you’d probably be better off asking your hosting company to do it for you.
Depending on your server and PHP configuration, you would either need to recompile PHP to include the new version of cURL, or drop the appropriate .dll/.so file in the right directory.
[...] Broken Link Checker – “Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the [...]