Broken Link Checker Plugin Version 0.3
I’ve gotten some interesting feature suggestions for my link checker WordPress plugin since I released the last version several months ago. During the last week I finally got around to implementing some of them. Enjoy 
What’s New
Making broken links look different
There’s now an option to add a “broken_link” CSS class to known broken links. In the default configuration this will simply add a strike-through effect to the links. If you know CSS, you can define your own style in the Options -> Link Checker tab, or in your stylesheet. The style is only applied when a post is displayed, so your posts won’t actually be modified.
Exclusion list
Links that contain (in the URL) any of the excluded words won’t be checked. You can also add domain names or complete URLs to the list. Note that this doesn’t affect links that already show up as broken. If you want to permanently hide some of those, update the exclusion list accordingly and “discard” the broken links.
Remove broken links without editing the post
The list of broken links (Manage -> Broken links) now has a new button for each link – “Unlink”. It will remove all instances of the broken link from the post, but will leave the link text intact. So “a link” would turn into “a link”. This doesn’t work for missing images though.
Get the Update
Download : broken-link-checker.zip (~9Kb).
Or, if you have WP 2.3.x, use my Single Click Plugin Updater to upgrade the link checker plugin 
I’ve just uploaded a new version that will (hopefully) fix the “Unlink” button.
I’m seeing the following message at my dashboard:
That’s because your server has safe mode enabled. You can make the message go away by changing this line in wsblc_ajax.php :
to this :
(Note the @ symbol.)
Personally I think turning off safe_mode is a better solution, but that’s probably not an option for most shared hosting accounts (I assume your website is on shared hosting).
Doesnt work for me didnt detect a broken link that i posted on purpouse.
Not enough information
A fab, much-needed plugin! I’m just dusting off my unloved blog and upgrading it to WP 2.5, so discovering new (to me) plugins like yours is a joy. Of course, one finds a fair number of broken links after leaving a site fallow for a while, too. Am I mistaken, or does your plugin not check the Links (née Blogroll) links? ‘Cos that would be handy it would.
Yes, it only checks links in posts and pages, but no the blogroll. Ah well, I’ve added your idea to the ever-growing wishlist
i would like to the ability to delete the post from the broken llnks page as well as a mass delete option by checking boxes of posts that are broken.
Hmm, that’s not going to happen. Your situation is probably very rare if you need to delete a post just because a link becomes invalid.
would it be hard to place a delete post link in a colum on the broken links manager ? beside each post so i can click delete?
Not extremely hard, but it would be useless to most people, and only take up screen space.
ok could i perhaps be able to convince you to create a version with it for me and perhaps anyone else who wants it
Hmm….
If it was easy – maybe. However, I just looked at the code and it seems that it would be pretty hard to add a “Delete Post” button that works both in WP 2.3 and WP 2.5 (due to the significant interface changes in WordPress 2.5).
If you’re okay with it working only in WP 2.3 then I can add it.
ahh, im using wp 2.5 now ;(
Well, I did some tests and it seems it may work in WP 2.5, too… I’ll get back to it tomorrow
awesome thank you
New version is up!
thank you very very much works like a charm
i only saw one problem, after deleting the 517 broken links when i goto the mange broken links it still lists 517 not really an issue the dashboard doesnt show that number either in case you were wondering
correction the dashboard does show the 517 broken links message but eitherway minor bug
You know, when you hit the “Delete” link, it just sends a request to the server – it’s not deleted instantly. So if you click it a lot of times and navigate away from the page some links might not get deleted
ahh, well it appears it has worked
thank good plugin broken link checker
You know what would be great to add on to this would be to list the 301 redirects, and an ability to mass update them by any certain domain which changes their URL format. This would identify in most cases expired domains which become link farms and return as a 301, but certainly not something you want to still link to.
@JC – Your idea was added to a very long list of suggested features. That is all.
Wooow. Nice Plug. Very nice share
Having just moved from one blogging platform to Wordpress, I had a ton of internal broken links. I would like to suggest that the broken link list just show internal links and links from specific domains. There’s not much I can do about external links but I like the way they are crossed out.
Using it with 2.7 without issues so far.
[...] Broken Link Checker Plugin Version 0.3 [...]
Works well! great thanks, using in 2.7.1 ok.
It does find some broken links in post revisions which could confuse some.
(I have now disabled and removed all revisions!)
I have set to link check every 730 hours (1month), as our posts don’t change that often. Is this wise? I just wanted to save bandwidth. Does this checker use much processing power & bandwidth?
A month seems too much for me, I wouldn’t use anything higher than 2 weeks myself.
The plugin doesn’t use that much bandwidth. It tries to use only HEAD requests (doesn’t download the page, just checks it) when possible. However, it will double-check problematic links by attempting to download the entire page, which could expend a bit more bandwidth.