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Note : This page, and the feature list below are slightly out of date as a major update has been released recently (see details).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 –

  1. Download (see below).
  2. Unzip.
  3. Upload the broken-link-checker folder to you wp-content/plugins directory.
  4. Activate the plugin in the Plugins tab.

Upgrading

  1. Deactivate the plugin (important!).
  2. Do steps 1.-3. from “Installation”.
  3. Upload the broken-link-checker folder to you wp-content/plugins directory.
  4. Re-activate the plugin in the Plugins tab.

DownloadCC-GNU GPL
Version 0.5.3 : broken-link-checker.zip (40 Kb)
Compatibility : 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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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 22:59 and is filed under Applications, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

877 Responses to “Broken Link Checker for WordPress”

Pages: [1] 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 … 30 » Show All

  1. 1
    jameswillisisthebest says:
    September 9, 2007 at 01:33

    This is my first post
    just saying HI

  2. 2
    Six Wordpress Plugins You Didn’t Know About | W-Shadow.com says:
    October 4, 2007 at 20:13

    [...] Broken Link Checker Checks your posts for non-working links and lets you know (on the dashboard) if any are found. It’s of the “set and forget” kind, as it does the checks in background. Sometimes generates “false alerts”, probably because no site is up 100% of the time. And yes, this is one of my creations [...]

  3. 3
    Ief says:
    October 11, 2007 at 10:11

    thx!! i’m going to try it

  4. 4
    ø Broken Link Checker Plugin 0.2 Update | W-Shadow.com ø says:
    October 13, 2007 at 23:22

    [...] Broken Link Checker Wordpress plugin has been updated to version 0.2! Here’s what’s new [...]

  5. 5
    ø How To Run A PHP Script In The Background | W-Shadow.com ø says:
    October 16, 2007 at 19:23

    [...] you could also launch the script from the client side by using AJAX. This is what I do in my link checker plugin for WordPress. Another possibility is to store the tasks that need to be done in a database [...]

  6. 6
    tony says:
    October 16, 2007 at 23:56

    WordPress database error: [Unknown column 'hidden' in 'where clause']
    SELECT count(*) FROM wp_blc_linkdata WHERE broken=1 AND hidden=0

    No broken links found

    WordPress database error: [Unknown column 'a.hidden' in 'where clause']
    SELECT b.post_title, a.* FROM wp_blc_linkdata a, wp_posts b WHERE a.post_id=b.id AND a.broken=1 AND a.hidden=0 ORDER BY a.last_check DESC

  7. 7
    White Shadow says:
    October 17, 2007 at 00:29

    tony : Try deactivating the plugin and activating it again.

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