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Note : This page, and the feature list below are slightly out of date as a major update has been released recently (see details).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.
yes because after activating the plugin i got imidiatly the message: Broken Link Checker can’t create a lockfile. First i made the blc directory writable but that had no affect then tried a custom path, also no affect.
i forgot to mention that with or without using a custom path i also get this message every time: Error : This directory doesn’t exist.
its been like this http://i46.tinypic.com/1fy3hx.jpg for an hour now, doesnt do anything
Try the development version. If that doesn’t help, I suggest temporarily downgrading to version 0.7 while I try to fix this bug.
okay thanks i will try
Yep downgrading did the trick works good!
[...] * Broken Link Check [...]
Pls fix Version 0.7.2, i had the same problem with PK: Broken Link Checker can’t create a lockfile.
Thank you.
Do try the development version.
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[...] 4. Broken Link Checker(추천) “Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.” 많은 분들이 알고 사용하고계실 플러그인이죠? 자신의 블로그안에 깨진 링크가 있는지 모니터링해줍니다. 확실히 작동하는지 확인한것은 일전에 일본어 블로그가 아직 준비되지 않은 시점에서 미리 링크만 걸어둔 일이 있는데, 그걸 이녀석이 잘도 캣치하더군요. 다만 링크가 다시 연결된 뒤에도 남아있어서 설정화면에서 체크내역을 삭제해주었습니다. 여러모로 유용한 플러그인이죠~ Janis Elsts | Visit plugin site [...]
Doesn’t seem to work on a windows machine ? (running apache/php/mysql)
Can you elaborate? I’m running Windows on my dev. computer and it works fine.
[...] Broken Link Checker by Janis Elsts This plugin checks and validates all the links on your blog and reports its findings on your dashboard. If it finds a broken link, you can open the report and, with a couple clicks, fix the broken link. No need to open the post, find the link, and then correct it. The in-post corrections are made for you! I have it on all of my sites. Definitely cuts down on your webmaster email traffic due to 404 errors! By the way, if you are having 404 errors, you need to see Redirection below. [...]
Debug info is all green. When i do manual check all i get:
No broken links found.
No URLs in the work queue.
No links detected.
[...] Broken link checker Requires at least version WP-2.0.2 and tested up to WP-2.5.1. [...]
Try the Recheck button. When you press it, does the status display say “Looking for links…” (or something to that effect), or does it go back to “No links detected” immediately? Also, what’s your PHP version?
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It immediately shows no links detected.
I have php 5.3.0
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Awesome plugin. I don’t know how I did not find this till now. Fixed some broken links on my blog, voted that it works on Wordpress 2.8.6 and gave it 5 stars.
@ lowspeed : Sorry for not responding earlier. I haven’t been able to come up with a probable cause for the bug, but here’s something you could try to get additional information : the debug version of the plugin.
If you install Firefox, Firebug and FirePHP, you will be able to see the debug messages this version outputs when processing your posts. To do that, go to the plugin’s settings page, open the Firebug console and click the “Recheck” button. It should display a whole lot of information as it parses (or tries to parse) your posts for links.
I don’t know what specifically you should be looking for, but maybe some error message catches your eye.
Thanks for your help, especially since i’m not expecting any support for this.
I installed the debug version. already had firebug so i installed firephp.
When i do recheck, nothing happens (firephp is enabled)
It should just display the info in the browser portion ?
It should display it in the Firebug console, i.e. the thing that shows up when you click the Firebug icon in the status bar.