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.
At what interval does it check ? I have it set to 5 seconds for how long it checks, but my blog slows way down for a page request when it is running. If I could set this plugin to run for 5 seconds once every 60 seconds that would be great. This page slowdown is only there when the plugin is active and I’m in the admin panel. I think.
I broke my site during the wp2.5.1 upgrade, reloaded and now the database links have shuffled. So I probably have many broken links or static links that go to the wrong post. I had deleted old posts here and there, and when I reuploaded the database backup, mysql redid the post numbers filling in the blank spots.
Thanks,
D.J.
The option that you can set is how often the plugin is invoked (how often it runs). So if you have it at 5 seconds, it will
1) start up every five seconds (launched by JavaScript from the admin panel)
2) run for five seconds (approximate)
3) repeat from 1. while there are links to check
The intention is to use all the alloted time, so in an ideal case the plugin will run continuously – until there are no more links to check.
If it slows down you dashboard too much, try setting it to very long intervals instead.
thanks, I’ll try that.
White Shadow, you already have everything you need to implement what I mentioned (The click on the link and it shows an input box for faster link fixing). You already have the Regular Expressions in the wsblc_ajax.php file, just make a callback like unlink_link_callback and use a different $matches variable (Maybe $matches[0] I think is the href, not positive), the SQL queries already seem to be fine. The only major change will be adding the input box and all of that, and you can see an example of that in the wp-admin\js\slug.js file, the first function, edit_permalink. This function is the one that shows the input box and all of that.
I’m not trying to say it’s absolutely easy and bashing you for not doing it or anything, I would do it if I had a better understanding of this, just trying to help you out with some clarifications. If you ever want to give it a try, I’ll be glad to test it out for you. Like I said earlier, I’m /positive/ that every one of your users will benefit from this. It’d definitely be faster than having to click edit post for each post and look through the long post to find the link. Not trying to nag or anything though I know it’ll probably seem this way, just trying to show that I really care about this feature enough to investigate.
Ahem. It definitely isn’t easy. I tried, and got weird and unusual MySQL errors that I couldn’t trace to any particular source. Still, I’ve uploaded an experimental implementation to wordpress.org (you should get an “upgrade available” notice in your “Plugins” tab).
Hmm…don’t know what errors you’re talking about, where do you get them and when? I’ve tried the new plugin and it works perfectly, really, I’ve tried it multiple times.
One weird thing is that when I click view post on some of them, it uses my old domain name, only on posts that were created when I had that domain name, but I’m not sure if it’s your plugin’s own doing.
Well, you never know when a bug might crop up
The plugin gets the URL for the “View” link from the WordPress database (using the “guid” filed). Some of your older posts probably have outdated database info. I think.
Yeah I figured that out by viewing your plugin’s source, I simply ran a REPLACE query on the guid table so that’s fixed now. The only problem is that some of the guid’s are of when I used different permalinks (for example /p?=432) and as far as I can tell there’s no way of fixing that (I already tried update permalinks). Oh well, but hey at least your plugin is working perfectly fine. If I ever notice anything then I’ll hit you up.
You should announce this new feature man, I’m positive you’ll get a lot of attention for it and many people will love it. It would’ve been neater if you could do it like the slug editing is: The URL is just text and when one clicks on it it becomes the textbox and when one clicks outside of it or on the save link/button it saves it (If not the former then at least the latter). This would be a lot more intuitive and make for a smoother process. But hey at least it’s working now, perfectly fine too! This suggestion is just as a touch up.
I’ll let you know if anything happens but so far the plugin is working great. If you need anything let me know!
I suspect nearly 30% of my posts are about new plugins/features. So I’d rather skip posting about small updates
Hi,
Thanks for your amazing plugin!
I have a request for an enhancement.
I went through the source code and noticed that the “View” links are generated according to the the GUIDs. This may cause problems on non-English blogs, such as my blog in Chinese. I think using permalinks is a better approach. Hope this helps!
Thanks again.
Regards
Leo
Ahha, and how do I get the permalinks? (It’s probably not extremely hard, but I didn’t figure it out when writing that code)
You can probably use get_permalink, giving it the post’s ID as the parameter. This function is provided by WordPress core.
Anyway I’ve not tried that yet. Good luck with that! We can find a way out together if you are faced with any coding problem.
Interesting, that seems to work. I’ll have a new version up soon, thanks
Yeah I was about to tell you to do what Leo said, it’s definitely better and more logical.
hey white shadow, as mentioned in my pioneer (around 10 to 20) comment earlier in the development of your genius plugin – I do still get the unlink error.
only occurs with images (wikipedia and my own), do you have any idea how to fix that?
cheers,
jez
I didn’t figure it out at first, but now I know it doesn’t work because I haven’t added any specific “image-unlinking” code. So the “Unlink” button only works for links.
Maybe one day
[...] noarchive) along with Nofollow Case by Case. Add in Google XML Sitemaps, Ozh’ Better Feed, Broken Link Checker and PagerFix if/as applicable, for bonus [...]
This is a very cool plug-in but I’m having some trouble with it. It’s constantly reporting many valid URLs as if they were invalid, aside from catching the occasional invalid one. I’ve experimented with the settings to no avail. I’m running 2.5… Any suggestions? Thanks
It’s possible that those links that are incorrectly reported as broken point to websites that employ some kind of anti-bot protection, which might block the link checker. This has already happened before.
Another possibility is that the “broken” links load very slowly, so the connection times out and the plugin assumes the links don’t work.
Yeah… I’m seeing it happening now on multiple blogs, each of which aren’t having load time issues and are also running plug-ins like Bad Behavior, AntiLeech and/or others (many of the URLs reported as invalid are internal)… I’ll play with different configurations to try to pin down where the incompatibility lies. thx
[...] Broken Link Checker: And lastly I like this plugin because it shows me what posts have broken links on them so I can correct the problems and eliminate future seo problems because of missing pages! Last 10 posts in Readers QuestionsQuestions Need Answers #1 – May 24th, 2008Advertisments For Technology – April 14th, 2008What Are Authority Sites? – April 3rd, 2008Readers Questions – February 4th, 2008 Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
Nice plugin! Thanks a lot! I hope that in future version could check broken links in comments too.
I’m testing comments to see if the DNS issue is on my end, or somewhere else.
Hi,
How can i use link checker for rapidshare or mu links?
Is it work for those?
@Piklog – I suppose it should work for those as well, but I haven’t tested it.
I’m new wp user, can you test it for me?
I think RS, MU links are different from direct link checking.
It’s different.
thanks
@Piklog – Ah okay, you’re just being lazy here, how hard would it be to add a RS link to a post and see if the link checker catches it?
Anyway, I tested it, and it doesn’t work for them. Apparently RS won’t report the standard 404 HTTP code when a file is missing. Shame on them.
[...] 4. Broken Link Checker [...]
Hello! I made the Broken Link Checker translatable.
It’s here – http://mistress.hweia.ru/2008/06/broken-link-checker/ (the post is in russian, but it’s the only .zip there, hard to miss
@Anna – Thanks. I fixed a few things (that shouldn’t have been translater) and will upload a new version soon.
By the way, I understand Russian just fine, though I’m not russian myself.