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.
[...] Broken Link Checker für WordPress wird einfach im Backend aufgerufen und überprüft dann die gesamte Website. Im [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are [...]
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.
[...] and the following invaluable plugins: askimet, podpress, all in one seo pack, google sitemaps, broken link checker, contact form II, wp database backup, get recent comments…we love open source code! (and [...]
[...] Links kommen hier im Blog in Zukunft nicht mehr vor, dank des Broken-Link Plugins von White Shadow. Es scannt bequem im Hintergrund alle vorhandenen Links in allen Posts und listet [...]
[...] 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.
I am using it, but since I activated WP-SuperCache it throws an Internal Server Error (every second). It looks like the settings for this plugin (.htaccess changed) are interferring the work of your plugin. Could this be and how could I solve this?
Cheers
Sebari
@ sebari : That’s interesting. I’m using WP-SuperCache 0.8.8 myself and I haven’t encountered any problems. In fact, I can’t immediately think of any possible way these plugins could conflict. You might have better luck reporting this issue to the author of WP-SuperCache.
[...] by signing up with google and using their web tools to check, download the plugin for wordpress Broken Link Checker, use this site dead-links, or you can do it the hard way and just click every link on your [...]
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I always get a broken link message for the following link:
http://www.panasonic.de/html/de_DE/2036940/index.html
but everytime I’m testing the link there are no problems.
Andreas
@ Andreas : Click the “Details” link in the report, there might be some clues there. Other than that, all I can suggest is adding the link to the exclusion list.
@ White Shadow : “Details” says:
1. Log : === First try : No response. ===
Trying a second time with different settings…
=== Second try : No response. ===
Link is broken.
Hmm, this would usually be a temporary error. The plugin tried to access the link and got no response from the target server – not even an error message. This might happen (very occasionally) if the server was overloaded, but if the problem reoccurs then the target server might be actually blocking the plugin, or similar.
Then the server must block the plugin as it happens with every link to this server and always.
I’ll put the server on the exclusion list.
Thanks, Andreas
can you make plugin to check rapidshare, depositfiles … if links are alive or dead
@ Matrix : Probably not. That would needlessly complicate the plugin.
[...] who gladly contribute plugins and one of those plugins that currently serves me very well is the Broken Link Checker plugin. It scours your posts and pages for links that do not lead to working pages anymore i.e. [...]
Very nice plugin, I found a bunch of broken links on my blog! o.O;;;