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Note : This page, and the feature list below are slightly out of date as a major update has been released recently (see details).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)
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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I love this plugin and I’ve been using it for a while. However, I’ve been getting some false positives, in particular from IMDb. I review movies for fun and always link to IMDb, both movie titles and actors. I have over 17 false positives right now. Is there a way to fix this?
Thanks!
I’ll be releasing a new version of the plugin relatively soon (hopefully next week, with a public beta coming ~tomorrow). I suggest waiting for that and, if you still have the same problem with the new version, get back to me and I’ll see what I can do.
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Hi,
i talked to you about the 302-redirection problem a while back,how it worked on my previous site but not on the new site,remember?
Well,my new site opens in about a week or two,and its packed with links i need to check daily.When its finished i have over 4000 links.
I tried numerous other link-ckeck apps but non with satisfactory results.So im turning to you for help again!But this time i want to ask you if you could help me for a fee,or rather cash-money(although i`m not rich).Thanks in advance.
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Somewhat hazily. You wanted redirect detection, yes? Try the new beta. It has that feature implemented in a more reliable manner than in any of the previously suggested hacks.
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Well thank you very much,works like a charm!Is there any way to clear the detected redirection urls on the redirection page?Thanks in advance.
Not as such, but if you edit the link in question so that it points to the actual target URL (and not the redirect) then it won’t show up on that page anymore.
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