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.
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/
@moserw : Maybe your hosting just can’t handle it. I don’t know of anyone who’s had a similar problem :/
[...] Broken Link Checker 0.3.3: Does what it says. When I began, I did not know Yahoo didn’t keep its URLs, and the Marines don’t either. So, I have a lot of broken links. Nice thing is, if the link is broken, it displays with a line through it. [...]
it might be an idea to add a notice or remove the download link, of the older version … it had me confused for a bit !
blc is great but its shows me every email-adress as broken link. Is there a feature not to look for emails but only for homepages?
Not yet, but I’ll add something soon. I’ll just make it ignore “mailto:” links.
this is a wonderful idea !
[...] Broken Link Checker for WordPress Plugin (tags: wordpress plugin wp-plugins) [...]
A very useful plugin!
I have found one small hitch though: I have a number of code examples (enclosed in
Thanks.
Yes, that seems doable. I’ll add it in the next version.
By the way, if you want the <code> tags show up in the comments here, you’ll have to write the angle brackets as < and >
While I don’t have the means to donate, I have put this plugin on my ‘whats new’ page and suggested WP users get it and install it.
I had to reinstall wp a few months ago after I hiccuped the mysql database. Many of my pages have links on the page to other parts of the blog. I felt just the category listing would mean too many clicks for viewers. So… the static links I had were out of sequence. I had corrected over 100 by hand over 3 months. This plugin found all of the remaining bad links I had been searching for in less than a day, 120 of them.
Thanks for a great plugin !
Thank you
[...] currently into the broken link hunt here at Deuts.NET. Thanks to the Broken Link Checker plugin by Janis Elsts, finding those broken links is a breeze. Two years into blogging, there will [...]
[...] Broken Link Checker der im gesamten Blog auf defekte Links prüft, funktioniert leider noch nicht. Er lässt [...]
Truly excellent. A sincere thank-you.
[...] Broken Link Checker [...]
I had moved a lot of my photos in my gallery which my blog has about 100 links to, therefore I probably have about 100 broken links. However there seems to be a limit to how many you can see on the broken link page. After you have fixed those it doesn’t show the other broken links.
So right now it says I have 26 broken links but my broken links page is blank. I did fixed 20 of them yesterday (it said there was 46 broken links then). I tried clearing cache and logging out but the page is still blank. So how do I fix the other 26 broken links?
[...] tome diversas ações a respeito. Trata-se do “Broken Link Checker“, desenvolvido pelo W-Shadow.com, o qual já está instalado e funcionando aqui no Open2Tech. [...]
There is no hard-wired limit to how many links the page will display.
Do you mean that it says somewhere that you have 26 broken links, but doesn’t display them on the “Broken Links” page (even after you refresh it)? I can’t think of any way that could happen.
A few things that might provide some clues :
* If you delete a post, all the broken links from that post will be gone, too (as you’d expect).
* When you edit a post all of it’s links (even those that you didn’t change) are removed from the “Broken Link” list and re-checked as soon as possible. This may take a while if there are a lot of links to check.
* Theoretically, in very rare circumstances, it is possible for the broken link table become desynchronized from the “posts” table. In this case, deactivate the plugin, activate it again and click “Recheck All Links” in the “Options -> Link Checker” page. This is pretty much the same thing as reinstalling the plugin, and should fix any discrepancies.
[...] Broken Link Checker 0.3.5 » Janis Elsts (url) Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. [...]