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Note : This page, and the feature list below are slightly out of date as a major update has been released recently (see details).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 works on WordPress 2.3.2?
thanks…
Yes, it does. In fact, I just upgraded to 2.3.3 and it seems to be working okay.
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I want complain on XHTML validation when enabling this plugin with broken link CSS turned on. It says that broken-link bla-bla is not valid.
Here is the solution (may be author would add this to further versions):
1. Open broken-link-checker.php.
2. Find there string:
echo ”,$this->options['broken_link_css'],”;
3. Replace it with:
echo ”,$this->options['broken_link_css'],”;
4. Save and upload changed file on server.
Thats all! Thank you for your attention. =)
I TOTALLY LOVE this plugin… which is one of the most useful WordPress plugins I’ve come acrossed. I wish it would check broken links in comments… That would make it even more better.
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FYI: I changed my blog permalink structure and I use .htaccess file to redirect 301 all pages with the old permalink structure targetting to the new permalink structure, then I install BrokenLinkChecker.
BLC installed successfully BUT, this URL:
http://www.averagecoder.net/programming-tips/wordpress/how-to-easily-display-a-cute-google-map-inside-your-wordpress-post/
Which is working when you access it via web browser is identified as broken link by BLC.
I think it’s a good idea if BLC can works in conjunction with .htaccess rewrite rules.
_______________
Daniel
I’m not entirely sure why it showed up as broken in your blog. Nevertheless, I’ve made some tweaks to the plugin and it should now handle that URL correctly. At least it does on my test blog
@White Shadow: You’re right, it seems to be working as expected. I am not sure why it reported false broken links before. I will keep monitoring the behavior .
_______________
Daniel
Strange, it was working fine with older plugin version… then I updated to 0.3.2 today. Then it falsely reported 132 broken links. I checked all of of them and none of them were broken.
Even weirder, after activating the plugin, my WordPress Dashboard started loading very slowly, so I deactivated the plugin then “tried” to activate again and now I can’t activate at all… because I now keep getting this message:
“Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”
But now my WordPress Dashboard (2.3.3) is loading fine and fast. Hmm.
Strange. I suppose it could cause a slowdown in very specific circumstances (AJAX/broser/server configuration) while the links are checked.
Though I don’t see how it could “trigger a fatal error”. Hmm.
I updated to 0.3.2 and suddenly every link on my site became “broken” according to the plugin, but when I tried them, they all worked perfectly.
Nothing else changed apart from this update. The previous version worked perfectly.
Seems you’re not the only one to experience this. I’ll download 0.3.1 and 0.3.0 from the WP plugin database (there’s a link for “Other versions”) and try to find which change might have caused it.
On a related note, it seems that this plugin is now getting blocked by Bad Behaviour. Maybe that’s at least part of the problem?….
Hi. I installed the plugin and it appears to work fine with one exception. Once the plugin is activated, my system slows down to a crawl when navigating in the WordPress environment. As soon as I deactivate the plugin, everything is normal again.
It I’m using Version 2.3.3. Any help will be greatly appreciated!
Dana Betz
Oops. Just realized others are experiencing similar problems. Thanks again for any help.
Dana
I don’t know why this happens, but my guess would be it’s something to do with the web browser. Try a different browser and see if it helps.
Graeme Says: March 13th, 2008 at 6:55 am
I updated to 0.3.2 and suddenly every link on my site became “broken” according to the plugin, but when I tried them, they all worked perfectly. Nothing else changed apart from this update. The previous version worked perfectly.
<<< Ditto me
Do you have any plugins/server modules that block bots? Some of them identify this plugin as a malicious bot, and will cause all of your links show up as broken.
Also, try the 0.3.3 version that I just uploaded.
<<>> yes- if Akismet and BadBehavior are what you mean… and it is imperative they stay as well.
<<>> where, please? at this writing 3.2 is linked above and on the WP Plugins Page http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/
thx
RH
Damn, I suspected I had forgotten something. I uploaded the changes, but didn’t update the version information. It’s up now (wordpress.org will take 10-20 minutes to refresh).
I’ve got nothing against Bad Behaviour (which is probably the culprit here). However, I don’t think I’d be able to “fool” it into treating the plugin as harmless, now that BB has started blocking it.
0.3.3 is at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/ now – thx
0.3.3 is working ok for me – no apparent conflicts w BB –
thx
RH
Hi, I’d previously reported issues above that other people experienced (slow crawl, false broken links, etc.). Incidentally, I also have Bad Behavior plugin installed, so maybe that was a reason…
Anyway, you’ll be glad to know that I tried latest 0.3.3 and it seems to be working fine now…. for me. No false broken links, no weird activation issue (message that it could not be activated because it caused “fatal error”), etc. Great.
Thanks for the fixes. And thanks for releasing one of the most useful plugins that has ever been created for WordPress! It should be part of WordPress!
I just wish there was a feature/plugin that would check author links/any links in comments. I hate promoting broken links.
0.3.3 solved the problem. Only showing the one broken link that is actually broken, no false alarms and the admin pages speed seems fine in Firefox for me. Running several bot-blockers BB, Sabre, etc. and nothing clashing. Yeay
I tried this plugin but its giving me 408 Request Timeout all the time. What am I doing wrong? I mean its taking down my entire website. Any help would be appreciated.
moserw
http://www.nela.in/