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Note : This page, and the feature list below are slightly out of date as a major update has been released recently (see details).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.
[...] Broken Link Checker – A plugin for WordPress that checks your posts for broken links, and lets you know if any are found. [...]
The plugin was supposed to already understand relative URLs, but it appears I forgot to fully implement that feature. It should work better in the new version I’ve just uploaded to wordpress.org (0.5.6).
That is really a very useful tool, thanks.
Excelente plugin… ya lo he usado en varios sitios y funciona de maravilla, he logrado corregir una gran cantidad de vínculos rotos!
Saludos cordiales
I just wrote a review of your great plugin on my blog: http://www.word-ex-press.com/an-useful-plugin-broken-link-checker/.
Thanks for your job!
[...] können diese mit einem Klick entfernt werden. Das Plugin nennt sich Broken Link Checker von W-Shadow und prüft erstellte Artikel, Seiten und die Blogroll nach toten Links. Selbstverständlich [...]
[...] Scans your post for non-working links. This keeps you from looking dumb when people come to your site from search engine and find bad links.by W-Shadow. [...]
Addition to your answer with id: 657
I updated to thew new version and most oft my “broken links” did disappear. I fixed the other ones manually.
But one thing which still does not work. If the relative link starts with “../” or “../../” etc. the link is reported to be broken.
Specific examples would be nice. It’s supposed to handle URLs like that, so I need to see a more specific situation where it fails to find the bug.
[...] can also use the ‘Broken Link Checker‘ plugin which makes it a breeze to find and fix broken [...]
Hi,
I was wondering if the plugin already had this capability or if it doesn’t it would be good to have it.
This plugin I think so far only checks official links that you can click on. But can it check just a simple url without being in a link format?
Like this: http://www.google.com
and not http://www.google.com
EDIT:
Hi,
I was wondering if the plugin already had this capability or if it doesn’t it would be good to have it.
This plugin I think so far only checks official links that you can click on. But can it check just a simple url without being in a link format?
Like this: http ://www. google.com (added spaces so it wouldn’t link) Basically urls that you have to copy and paste into your browser to get to it and now just one that you can click on.
and not http://www.google.com
Thanks.
[...] the link right there instead of hving to fish for it within HTML code or in visual mode! Thank you Broken Link Checker! addthis_url = [...]
@Pascal : I shall add that to my To-Do list
[...] Broken Link Checker – Search engines hate broken links. Whenever you add a link to an image or a trackback to another blog you’ll find that the host of the blog/image may move or remove that link. This plugin will tell you on your Wordpress dashboard whenever it finds a broken link then give you the option to change it or de-link. Saves you the time of rummaging through your old posts checking for errors. [...]
[...] Auteur : http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/08/05/broken-link-checker-for-wordpress/ [...]
[...] Broken link Checker – Like anything else links too get broken, this pluggin will scan your posts for that and report any broken links in the dashboard section of wordpress. There you can easily fix them. [...]
This is a fantastic plugin. Thank you so much!
I noticed that the font styling was a little off in the dashboard widget. (Why I notice these things, I do not know.) If you change the div tag to p, it’ll match the other widgets, and you won’t need the line-height style. The script still loads correctly.
Alright, it shall be done. And thank you for the donation
[...] Scans your post for non-working links. This keeps you from looking dumb when people come to your site from search engine and find bad links.by W-Shadow. [...]
[...] been playing with the neat Broken Link Checker plugin today, I discovered a few links that had gone or changed and set about fixing them. During [...]
We are behind a huge firewall, and therefore we have to modify the code of Broken Link Checker, so that all links in our sites don’t become broken. But with each new release, we have to find out where to re-add the code
Here’s an example of the code we added from plugin version 0.4.14, Line 278:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, “http://our-firewall.domain.gov:1234″);
We’d certainly request a place to add the proxy in the admin interface. Please feel free to contact me directly with questions and I’ll relay them to our PHP expert.
Don’t post to websites in the morning before you’ve had your cup of tea!
Corrections to my previous post in brackets []:
“We are behind a huge firewall, and therefore we have had to modify the code of Broken Link Checker [with each upgrade], so that all links in our sites don’t [appear false postive] broken in BLC. But with each new release, we have to find out where to re-add the code.”
Here’s an example of the code we added from plugin version 0.4.14, Line 278:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, “http://our-firewall.domain.gov:1234″);
We’d certainly request a place to add the proxy in the admin interface. Please feel free to contact me directly with questions and I’ll relay them to our PHP expert.
I will donate to this plugin if you add a WP-blessed changelog to the Broken Links WP Plugins page
I shall add that to my To-Do list, too
But seriously, I’m currently working on updating another WP plugin, so these suggestions will have to wait. Though I will probably get around to implementing them within a week or two (at most).
@joebanks
Instead of making up new variables, you could just use the globally defined proxy settings in Wordpress.
WP_PROXY_HOST
WP_PROXY_PORT
@joshglemza
I am such a n00b. Thanks, Josh.
[...] found this plugin, which seems to be quite good at finding the dead-ends. For other WordPressers ready for a little [...]
[...] keep them all up to date, especially if you’re changing categories, titles, etc. Download the broken link checker for this. You may be surprised at just how many dead links you have. Don’t forget to check [...]
[...] keep them all up to date, especially if you’re changing categories, titles, etc. Download the broken link checker for this. You may be surprised at just how many dead links you have. Don’t forget to check [...]