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! (423 KB)
Features
- Detects links that don’t work and missing images.
- Periodically checks links in posts, pages, comments and the blogroll.
- New and modified entries are checked ASAP.
- Notifies you on the Dashboard if any problems are found.
- Lets you edit all instances of a specific link at once.
- Gives you a list of all links ever posted on your site, with the ability to search and filter it.
- Lets you apply custom CSS styles to broken and removed links.
- Highly configurable.
The broken links show up in the Tools -> Broken Links tab along. If any invalid URLs are found a notification will also show up on the Dashboard widget. To save screen real-estate, the widget can be configured to stay closed most of the time and automatically expand when broken links are detected.
Installation
Install “Broken Link Checker” just like any other WordPress plugin :
- Download the .zip file.
- Unzip.
- Upload the
broken-link-checkerfolder to you/wp-content/pluginsdirectory. - Activate the plugin in the Plugins tab.
Download
broken-link-checker.zip (423 Kb)
Requirements
- WordPress 3.0 or later
- MySQL 4.1 or later
The current version of this plugin is only compatible with WordPress 3.0 and up. If you have an older version of WP, try one of the older releases. Specifically, version 0.8.1 is the last one that’s still compatible with the WP 2.8 branch, and version 0.4.14 is the last one compatible with WP 2.1 – 2.6.x.
Thanks a lot for this plugin! Installing it right away!
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress – As your blog gets more and more posts, it can be difficult to go back and look for what has broken with time. This plugin will check images and links and notify you via the dashboard when it locates something. [...]
HI there,
I have just installed last relase of your plugin (0.5.10), but unfortunatly give me some error like this follow, on the page where linkchecker has find broken url…
Warning: html_entity_decode() expects parameter 2 to be long, string given in /home/luxemoz1/public_html/wp-content/plugins/broken-link-checker/highlighter-class.php on line 62
can you chek please
thanks
G.
Oops, that was a really silly bug/typo. Should be fixed now (might take a few minutes/hours before the update shows up on wordpress.org).
Hey…really fast support! Thanks
I have just installed the last version (0.5.11). But I had to deactivate the plugin because of this warning:
Warning: is_writable() [function.is-writable]: open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/tmp) is not within the allowed path(s): (…) in (…)/wp-content/plugins/broken-link-checker/core.php on line 2055
(…) I deleted the paths
Version 0.5.9 works fine for my blog. Could you check this please?
Diego, you’re not alone. I started getting that error with 0.5.10 and when 0.5.11 appeared I was pleased because I thought it would contain a fix. Unfortunately the problem persists. I’ve got it disabled now as well.
This should be fixed in 0.5.12 which will be up shortly.
*Wonderful!* Thank you very kindly. The error has disappeared after upgrading!
Congrats, your suport works better than other “plugin creator” offer on payment.
Thanks again!
(HEy i saw that your plugin is not localized yet. If you want i offer my service for italian translation)
Bye bye
I’ll put localization on my to-do list and let you know if/when I get around to it
OK contact me via email when you decide to start
I’ve been using this plugin for quite some time, and have been pretty pleased. Unfortunately, the updates over the last several months have caused problems.
Whenever I try to update automatically through WordPress, it says it failed because the directory already existed. So I have to manually rename the directory and then reinstall it. Which is rather time-consuming and annoying.
There have been a few times when this didn’t happen, so I don’t think it’s something on my end. Please take a look into this, so it doesn’t happen again.
[...] правильность удобно с помощью плагина Broken Link Checker, он позволяет прямо из админки исправлять битые [...]
This plugin is not working properly for me. I installed it and it came back with:
No broken links found.
No URLs in the work queue.
No links detected.
I found that it only detected the links if I went into each post and “edited” it. If I push the ‘Re-check’ all pages button however it goes back to saying what it was before and I have to bulk-edit all the pages again…
Great plugin. I wanted to let you know that it breaks both “Incoming Links” and “Google Analytics” dashboard widgets. It stops them from fully loading. This is not a huge issue, but something you might look into for the next release.
Thanks
Seems to be a great plugin but doesn’t work for me. It locks my system and I get a MySQL Server error. Any ideas about other conflicting plugins, e.g. Redirection, WP Super Cache?
Thanks!
Like everyone else, I adore this plugin.
I was, however, wondering if it would be possible to make it is that it also checks comment (particularly commentor URLs) links?
Thanks again for all your hard work!
@ Valerie : I, on the other hand, think it’s something on your end. In particular, it sounds like it could be a permission problem with newly created files. The reason it only shows up in some of the newest versions is that some of them contain new .php files (as opposed to just modified versions of old files).
@ Pixie : No idea why this would happen. Try installing the debug version and using the FirePHP addon to monitor the plugin’s activity. Maybe some interesting error messages will come up?…
@ Doc4 : I’ll look into it.
@ Jose : That sounds like the rare and mysterious “performance problem” that I can never replicate in any of my tests. What is the specific MySQL error you get? As for plugin conflicts, BLC is perfectly compatible with WP Super Cache (I’ve used both plugins on this very site for months) and probably shouldn’t conflict with Redirection.
@ Dee : It’s on my to-do list
@ Doc4 (again) : I suspect it could be a JavaScript issue; check your browsers error console for any error messages.
[...] dem „Broken Link Checker“, den man hier herunterladen kann, beseitigt man dieses Problem. Das Plugin ist schnell installiert und läuft hier [...]
Surprisingly enough I tried to activate the plugin again and now it is working like a charm. It’s a great plugin. Thank you.
Thanks a lot! Now it works …
Hi there,
one more question…. may your plugin generate strange url structure that Google WM tools detect as nothing found error?
like that follow:
http://www.luxemozione.com/2007/06/2009/09/incandescenza-non-ci-vedremo-mai-piu.html
Im also using a plugin that might caused these errors (about 100) but i’d like a confirmation…on 28 septermber, when the problem started, i have installed new translation plugin (that unfortunatly i bought) and updated yours as well.
thanks
G.
I don’t think it can do that. Still, you could always deactivate the plugin temporarily and see if the problem goes away.
Hi, ok ok BLC is now deactivated, I’ll keep you informed if something change
Thanks
Hi! one more little question, I noticed that you did’t insert last version changelog… there were significant change until V.0.5.12?
Bye
G.
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress – W-Shadow.com [...]
I’m just lazy about keeping the changelog up to date. I’ll update it in a minute.
Ok
! I know the problem….