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Note : This page, and the feature list below are slightly out of date as a major update has been released recently (see details).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.
Does it detect any links at all? It should show a status message on the configuration page that says how many URLs/links were detected. You can also see all detected links in Tools -> Broken Links -> All.
If any links are detected, check the list for the one’s that are supposed to be broken and see what their detailed log says. You can see the log by clicking either the “link text” cell of the corresponding row or the “Details” action link.
Hint : the newest links will show up at the end of the “All” list.
could you add support for rapidshare and Megaupload links to your plugin? :/ thanks
That would be tricky. They probably use non-standard error pages. So probably not in the near future.
It does detect Megaupload links,i use a lot of links from Megaupload and they get detected as a 302 redirection
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Having recently changed the permalink structure on my blog, I wanted to use Broken Link Checker as a tool to help me change internal links, but none of these seem to show up even though they are returning error 404s.
Does the plugin detect those links at all? Go to to Tools -> Broken Links and click on “All” to see the complete list of detected links. You can then click the “Details” link below each item in the list to see when/if that URL was checked and what the result was.
Also, make sure your site isn’t mentioned in the exclusion list in Settings -> Link Checker.
I’ve gone through the 64 pages of links it has detected and none that link to blog posts have been detected, although links to images and other media are detected.
Take this post:
http://www.stephennewton.com/nave-marketing-strategies2-easy4men/
The links with anchor text:
Barcelona…
Naïve Marketing Strategies#1: High-Low
Naïve Marketing Strategies#3: McDonald’s Salads Plus
are not detected. They all produce 404s.
This is consistent across the whole blog.
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I see your problem – those links don’t have quotes around the URL. This is invalid markup and the plugin can’t parse it.
I’m afraid fixing those links is up to you. I might add robust HTML parsing in a later version of the plugin, but that’s a long way off.