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Note : This page, and the feature list below are slightly out of date as a major update has been released recently (see details).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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Is the plugin compatible with wordpress 2.7 ?
Thank you for your great work.
I haven’t done any in-depth testing, but it appears to be working okay on my two WP 2.7 sites. I think it should be fine.
i have just downloaded it mate.. hope it works well for my website… thanks a lot for sharing..
http://www.edtechguide.com
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Hellon
like coment#302 I have this error on admin panel:
“Error: You can’t do that. Access denied.”
Hmm, try to log out and log in again. If that doesn’t help, try resetting your account’s role to “Administrator”.
[...] Broken Link Checker for Wordpress – this handy little tool can automatically check your entire wordpress blog for broken links and will alert them too you. You can also apply CSS to the broken link. [...]
Hey, nice plugin.
For some reason, whenever I update the options (pressing the button), I am redirected to my login page, and cannot proceed from there. Entering the password does not help.
If nobody else experienced it, it is probably a collision between your plugin and some other plugin i have – maybe MiniMeta widget, which incorporates some wordpress redirect function.
Anyways, thought Id let you know.
Indeed, it’s probably some kind of plugin conflict. As far as I know, nobody has reported anything similar yet.
There is a conflict with Broken Link Checker and a $97.00 paid-for plugin called ‘MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate WP Plugin.’ MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate is a plugin that cloaks affiliate links. Anyway, what happens is that Broken Link Checker will randomly put a strikethrough line through a couple of my affiliate links. I say “random” because I haven’t figured out any pattern as to why it will do that to one affiliate link and not other affiliate links. Your plugin is a good one but unfortuneately had to deactivate it because of that problem. I have no interest with the company that makes this plugin but you can see more about it here: http://www.mbpninjaaffiliate.com/ It would be nice to know if you plan on fixing your plugin so I can start using it again.
Thanks
Steve
I don’t have any immediate idea about how to fix the conflict itself, but you can remove the strikethrough by unchecking “Apply class=’broken_link’ to broken links” in the plugin’s settings (Setting -> Link Checker).
Also, you might be able to stop the link checker from checking cloaked links by experimenting wih the exclusion list on the same page. Find a piece of text that appears in all cloaked links and add it to the list. Though I’m not entirely sure if that would work because I haven’t used the Ninja Affiliate plugin.
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[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress – As your blog gets more and more posts, it can be difficult to go back and look for what has broken with time. This plugin will check images and links and notify you via the dashboard when it locates something. [...]
Hello!
I observed strange behavior with wordpress 2.7:
when I post youtube video, link checker reports them as dead. It’s not a problem – I can discard them, but… they are back sooner or later.
any update?
Is there anything interesting in the “Details” of the reported links? Maybe YouTube have started using some spambot protection that interferes with the plugin.
I have a couple of links showing as broken due to the way in which they are formed. Is it possible to add an options for exceptions whereby the user lists “links” which they don’t want checked so as to avoid those links appearing as broken links?
@ Gary O : Err, there’s already the “Exclusion list” for that. See Settings -> Link Checker
DOH!!!!
That’ll teach me to look more carefully before making a comment!
I’m so embarrassed.