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.
I really don’t like that the plugin automatically started checking my links. I activated the plugin and then clicked on the Settings link to go set things up, and the plugin started scanning on its own. I never got to even set the options because as soon as I saw it had a mind of its own, I uninstalled and deleted it. If you get that fixed, let me know, because I’d really like to use the plugin.
This is not a bug, it’s a feature
However, I’ll keep your suggestion in mind and might add an option to only check links on-request in a future version.
Salut,
first I want to thank you for your great work.
The Broken Link Checker is a really useful plug-in!
I wonder whether it’s possible to mute broken links in the “Broken Links Admin Tab”. There are cases in which I would like to keep the link but also a the note that it’s broken. So “exclude” didn’t work for me – at least it looked like it (Did I do something wrong??)
Another possibility would be to add an optional class for unlinked links. Such as “class=”removed_link”, like you offered for the broken links.
Just some ideas
no request…
When you say “mute”, do you mean you’d like the link to show up as broken in the post (i.e. have the broken-link CSS class) but hide it from the “Broken Links” table in the admin panel? That’s not possible in the current version. I’m also not entirely sure it would be very useful, but I’ll add it to my idea list.
I’ll add a CSS class for unlinked links in the next release (or possibly the one after that, in case the next one happens to be a bugfix-only update).
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I just installed the new link checker just an moment ago. I must say it’s an very awesome piece of software that will be great to have for any active blogger.
Broken links on your blog is not an good thing. You lose an lot of creditability with readers, this broken link checkers will solve those problems.
Antonio Coleman ‘TrafficColeman” Signing Off
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reg 884:
Hello White Shadow,
So thanks a lot for including it into a future release 
yes, that’s what I meant with “mute” – but I guess a CSS-class for unlinked links would be the better fix for the problem anyway
Have a great week!
thaks for this plugin i’ll tray it today great thanks
I just recently found out about cURL, I need to get more information on “where” to put this file after I have the latest version of it. And if it is in zip format, what is the true name of the file.
cURL is a PHP library, a server-side thing. If you don’t know how to update/install it, chances are you’d probably be better off asking your hosting company to do it for you.
Depending on your server and PHP configuration, you would either need to recompile PHP to include the new version of cURL, or drop the appropriate .dll/.so file in the right directory.
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thank you for this useful plugin
is there anyway to deactivate the notification…?
i keep receiving mails even if it is deactivated…
Thx in advance
What notification would that be? The link checker doesn’t send any email notifications, so whatever emails you’re receiving are probably sent by a different plugin.
accept my apologise,
I just figured that the 404 page i set up was sending me those…
So sorry,
best regards…
Hi,
I would like to use your plugin to check my review site to ensure the links are not broken. The links are in a custom field. However, I cannot seem to get the plugin to search this field. Is there any documentation about how to get the Custom Fields section of the plugin to work?
J.M. Snyder
In theory, all you need to do is enter the name of the custom field in the “Custom fields” box on the plugin’s configuration page.
If that doesn’t work then most likely the custom field is in a format that can’t be parsed by this plugin. It only understands custom fields that contain nothing but the link URL (for multi-line fields the URL should be on the first line).
Well, I think part of the problem is I’m not sure what the field name is. I used another plugin to create a custom write panel, and the field name is “Purchase Link.” If I put that in the Custom Fields box, it tries to put it on two lines.
I’ve looked at the MySql table and at the Post page but can’t figure out what the actual field code is. I guess I’ll just fiddle around with it until I get it to work. Thanks though!
J.M. Snyder
Point of interest – you could get a list of all custom fields used on your blog with this SQL query :
(This assumes you table prefix is wp_)
Unfortunately the space in my custom field name (Purchase Link) still makes the plugin separate both words onto different lines. Thanks for all your help!
Just an FYI ~ I went back and changed the name of my field to Purchase_Link (with an underscore) and it works now. Thanks for the awesome plugin! And for all your help! I’ll be donating a little something to you via Paypal for your help and effort!
Happy holidays!
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I guess this has been requested before but can you check comment link as well? I had people commenting my post 3-4 years ago and probably allot of those blogs have been taken down or change url by now.
Super nice plugin hope you keep supporting it.
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just curious, is “broken link” checker Broken? it seems as if every day I have to upgrade it to a newer version? I do not always check my plugins every day. will this be a problem for this plugin.?
@ dave l : The core functionality is pretty stable. Most of the updates consist small improvements suggested by users (e.g. using Esc/Enter in the “Edit URL” box, localized date display, and so on) and fixes for rare bugs (e.g. redirect detection failing when the server has a buggy version of cURL). You will not lose much if you don’t install the update(s) immediately.
Personally, I think periodic updates is a good thing. They show the plugin is up-to-date and actively supported.
@ Henrik : Yes, that’s been suggested before. I guess I’ll have to move it closer to the top of my to-do list.