Broken Link Checker for WordPress
Notice: This plugin has been transferred to ManageWP. I am no longer working on it. Please direct any feedback to the new developer. See the plugin homepage for more information.
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.
Features
- Detects links that don’t work, missing images, deleted YouTube videos and other problems.
- Periodically checks links in posts, pages, comments, custom fields 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.
Download
broken-link-checker.zip (412 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.
Installation
Install “Broken Link Checker” just like any other WordPress plugin :
- Download the .zip file (see below).
- Unzip.
- Upload the
broken-link-checkerfolder to you/wp-content/pluginsdirectory. - Activate the plugin in the Plugins tab.
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I love this plugin, however, it seems to fail on wordpress ver3.51 with multi-site setup.
It only works on the main domain. It would be nice if you updated it to function on current versions of wordpress.
The plugin should work fine on normal WP 3.5.1 installs, but it has never “officially” supported multi-site setups. Sure, there’s usually a good chance that it will work, but it’s no guaranteed to.
[…] Broken Link Checker When you have over 800 posts, you begin to lose track of what you have written and links that go to your site. This is one of those plugins that is strongly advised for any blog that has been around for more than six months. People are always changing URLs, their URL structure, or simply deleting pages or whole websites. This fun little app continuously goes through your links to see what is and is not working and allows you to make changes on the fly. […]
Just want to thank for the plug-in, it was a great help and saved much time – even some links were marked, even if they were correct.
A little pitty that ypur side is nor directly ‘twitter-able’ neither you are on flattr yet (flattr.com), because I#d like to send a micro-donation.
Thanks again very much
Ulrich
The plugin works on WPMU but for one site/blog activation at a time. You must deactivate the plugin on the current blog to activate on another blog/site.
[…] we hebben een Broken Link Checker toegevoegd die regelmatig kijkt of de links naar andere sites nog kloppen. Klopt er iets niet meer, […]
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Thanks it works. 🙂
I’ve been getting a lot of false positives in the past few weeks. The links appear struck through (apparently only to me, not my readers, thank goodness), but they work just fine. Single site, WP up to date, plug in up to date.
Any suggestions? I had 60 one day!
Do the false positives have anything in common – domain name, error message, file type (for example, maybe they’re all image links)?
[…] plugin that can do just that! You can find the ‘Broken Link Checker for WordPress’ here or by searching for the plugin via your WordPress […]
I seem to get false positives on linkes that are partly stores on other servers. Like links/images in articles picked from repost.us, Facebook etc.. Must stop using now, because it messed up. But the app is great, if this can be fixed.
SOLVED: Database error : Unknown column ‘dismissed’ in ‘where clause’
–> http://wordpress.org/support/topic/stopped-working-after-update
The plugin is great but the WP Engine consider this plugin a threat.
Wondering why?
Technically, they don’t consider it a “threat”, but they do think it’s too resource-intensive to be allowed to run on their service. Their “Disallowed plugins” page states that it “overwhelms the server with HTTP requests”.
Unfortunately, WP Engine have not given me any more details than that.
[…] http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/08/05/broken-link-checker-for-WordPress/ […]
[…] Broken Link Checker […]
[…] Broken Link Checker – “Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found” […]
[…] page and link was broken after the move. I almost dropped the effort, but found this plugin, Broken Link Checker by Janis […]