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! (423 KB)
Features
- Detects links that don’t work and missing images.
- Periodically checks links in posts, pages, comments and the blogroll.
- New and modified entries are checked ASAP.
- Notifies you on the Dashboard if any problems are found.
- Lets you edit all instances of a specific link at once.
- Gives you a list of all links ever posted on your site, with the ability to search and filter it.
- Lets you apply custom CSS styles to broken and removed links.
- Highly configurable.
The broken links show up in the Tools -> Broken Links tab along. If any invalid URLs are found a notification will also show up on the Dashboard widget. To save screen real-estate, the widget can be configured to stay closed most of the time and automatically expand when broken links are detected.
Installation
Install “Broken Link Checker” just like any other WordPress plugin :
- Download the .zip file.
- Unzip.
- Upload the
broken-link-checkerfolder to you/wp-content/pluginsdirectory. - Activate the plugin in the Plugins tab.
Download
broken-link-checker.zip (423 Kb)
Requirements
- WordPress 3.0 or later
- MySQL 4.1 or later
The current version of this plugin is only compatible with WordPress 3.0 and up. If you have an older version of WP, try one of the older releases. Specifically, version 0.8.1 is the last one that’s still compatible with the WP 2.8 branch, and version 0.4.14 is the last one compatible with WP 2.1 – 2.6.x.
This is my first post
just saying HI
[...] 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 [...]
thx!! i’m going to try it
[...] Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin has been updated to version 0.2! Here’s what’s new [...]
[...] 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 [...]
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
tony : Try deactivating the plugin and activating it again.
I’m not sure if my previous message made it through, but I cannot get your latest, 0.2.2, version to work on my WP 2.3 installation. I can configure the settings, and the database does get your two tables, but it never actually checks the links. I’ve activated and deactivated and I have the same problem.
Peace,
Gene
I responded to your first comment here.
[...] In WordPress? Our secret weapon to maintain our outgoing links in wordpress will be using this Broken Links WordPress Plugin. This plugin allow you to set an option to check all your links within X hours and report back to [...]
Thanks for creating this plug-in – after installing WordPress I simply couldn’t understand why such a basic maintenance function is not included in the base package. Fortunately I stumbled upon your plug-in.
I upgraded to version 0.2.3 this morning but unfortunately it behaves just as erratically as the previous release – showing numerous (103 right now) and always changing ‘broken links’ that work just fine.
I cannot find any sensible explanation except that the plug-in might use time-outs to determine if a link is not there and that my site doesn’t respond fast enough. Could this be the case?
Yes, it does use timeouts – it has to set some limits so that the server isn’t overwhelmed by dozens of processes waiting for a page that might or might not load.
Currently the timeouts can only be changed by editing the plugin files. If you want to do this, look in the file wsblc_ajax.php, lines 229 – 230 (they contain the word “timeout”). The first number is the connection timeout (default = 15 seconds), the second is an “overall” timeout (default = 25 seconds). You can try setting higher timeouts.
If you give me a few examples of links that are reported as broken and yet work fine, I’ll try to find out what the problem is.
BTW, the list of broken links is always changing because existing links are re-checked every once in a while, plus links that are reported as broken are being rechecked several times to (hopefully) get rid of most false positives.
Eh, bugs :/
http://www.prepressure.com/postscript/troubleshooting/errors
There are loads of ‘missing links’ on this page but I am fairly certain the page is OK