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Note : This page, and the feature list below are slightly out of date as a major update has been released recently (see details).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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[...] Broken Link Checker – I’m going to miss this one for awhile…it’s pretty handy and shows me all the links I have on my site that don’t work. (I don’t knowingly put links on here that don’t work, but sometimes links break when what I’m linking to changes or moves. Like Feedburner…all the links I had on previous posts broke when Feedburner moved to Google, and this handy little plug-in lets me know when that happens.) [...]
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.
Fortunately, I’ll probably be able to solve the problem with a .htacess redirect. I’ve been hand coding since 1994 and haven’t bothered keeping up with the more pedantic stuff.
It’s a shame linkchecker isn’t robust. Do you insist on double quotes or do you recognise single quotes too? It may be worth mentioning this issue in the readme.
In the meantime, many thanks for all your help. It’s appreciated.
It works with either kind of quotes.
As for why it isn’t robust – failure-tolerant and flexible HTML parsers are typically huge, complex beasts. I’m not quite convinced it’s worthwhile to add one of those to the plugin just so it can handle the odd malformed link. However, PHP 5 includes a semi-decent DOM parser, so I will eventually modify the plugin to use that when it’s available.
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Hi, I love this plugin but I’m having some problems with it. When I activate this plugin, most of my dashboard will fail to load. It will show the modules that come before where this module shows up on my dashboard, but not the ones after. This happened when I upgraded to Wordpress version 2.8. If you need more details please email me and I’ll do my best to help you. Like I said, I love this plugin, and I’d like to see an update so that I can use it again. =)
Thanks for you time.
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Just like Katrina (comment #569) said, the plug-in seems to be broken in WordPress 2.8 making my admin side fails to load. I emailed my hosting because I thought there was a problem in the server before I realize this
Hopefully it will be fixed!
Unfortunately I will need more information to fix this. I’ve emailed Katryna about it, but so far I haven’t received a reply.
It doesn`t report redirects anymore since wordpress 2.8
Any suggestions?