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Note : This page, and the feature list below are slightly out of date as a major update has been released recently (see details).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.
if i try to create the table it gives me this error:
The used table type doesn’t support FULLTEXT indexes
I’m using mysql: 5.1.40
need to force the query to ENGINE=MyiSAM not sure how to do it?
According to this page, you just need to add ENGINE = MYISAM after the last bracket in the CREATE TABLE command.
Super, thank for your help.
Maybe you should consider putting that command in the plugin’s next revision.
Thanks again!
Aye, I’ll probably do that. Cheers.
tks for plugin and info
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thanks for the plugin and all the information this will be very useful for bigger blogs
Hi, I think this plugin is really great, thank you so much for creating it. I would like to know if there are any plans to implement this feature in a future release, or if there is a simple way to batch-insert the “nofollow” tag to broken links?
I ask because, as a political blog, I have seven years’ worth of posts that link to news stories – many of which have now been archived or removed by the original sites. I could manually go through and find alternate sources or archive links for these thousands of links, but that’s fairly tedious. I could also bulk-remove them but that would be a bit like claiming that these posts didn’t have sources to begin with. So I would simply like to add “nofollow” to all these links.
Any thoughts?
Thanks again for the plugin and all the hard work.
I hadn’t thought of this myself, but I’ll add your suggestion to my idea list.
Perfect. Runs great. Thank you.
great plug in for word press lovers.. I loved it personally
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[...] dejando las antiguas tal y como estaban. Al cabo de un par de días, averigüé mediante el plugin Broken Link Checker que mis entradas anteriores también habían cambidado. Buscando por ahí encontré que con otro [...]
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Hi, This plugin is really great idea, and just what a newbie like me needs.
Actually between Christmas and today Jan 4 2010 90% of all my links from posts to pages were broken but not detected by the plugin. When I click on a pic in the post it is supposed to transfer me to a linked page but somehow it didn’t, it just looped back to post itself. Have manually re-done and re-updated all the linking. Its spooky because nothing wrong with the textlinks but I just needed to re-do re-update exactly the same thing!
Firstly I am puzzled why the links got broken and still haven found the answer. Secondly I am puzzled like is this plugin meant to detect this type of broken links? (the links became looped-back, not broken as in cannot find the other end).
My http://www.eddiebauerconvertibleevenfloconvertiblecarseat.com is now working again and my purpose in writing is to thank the author for the plugin, and to alert bloggers to be aware of this type of “broken” links, and to seek help from anyone out there who knows why this is happening because this is the 2nd time its happened to my site and I still don’t know why, its scary
The plugin is not meant to detect “looping” links. I don’t know why some links would behave like that, but I would guess it’s probably caused by a buggy plugin.
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Quick question: when this plugin is checking the links, is it doing it by querying the database, or is it trying to load the web pages themselves. Just curious as our site had a large spike in #page views, and so was wondering whether this plugin, which I had only just installed may be contributing.
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It checks the links by trying to load the linked-to webpages (even for links that point to the same site as the one the plugin is installed on). So yes, it could inflate your web stats by some amount. However, it would probably not lead to a largespike – unless you have thousands of internal links.
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