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’m running the AddThis plugin but never had a problem until now.
Hi.
It seems that protocol relative urls (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator#Relative_URL) won’t be checked correctly and lead to broken links. Is something planned to support these?
Sorry, forgot to mention urls of the form “//my.url”.
I’ve made some changes to how the development version stores plugin settings, please try it now:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/broken-link-checker.zip
Downgrading to 1.7 seems to be working for me so far. No pink screen.
@nightprogrammer: I’ve added protocol relative URL support to the development version (see link above).
Thank you so much. It appears this latest fix is holding. Fingers crossed. Thank you for all your efforts on fixing this.
[…] time back I discovered this handy-dandy WordPress plug-in called Broken Link Checker that schedules regular checks of all the links on your site and reports any that are broken. The […]
Hi, this plug-in has always worked great, but suddenly it’s finding dozens of “broken” links that all say “connection failed” even though when I check the links there is no delay and the links work fine. I dismissed them all, and they came back. I said “not broken” and most of them came back. After about 10 rounds of this they all went away…for the moment. What’s going on?? What’s the best way to tell the plug-in “cut it out!!”?
[…] Once the content was moved, I also then added the plugin called Broken Link Checker to make sure I didn’t have any broken links, especially with my photos. If you had the […]
Tried the development version and protocol relative links (//my.url) seem to work now. Thanks!
[…] stolper ich über das WordPress-Plugin Broken Link Checker. Das ist gut, denk ich. Der Checker entfernt die toten Links nicht gleich, der checkt die bloß. […]
Oddly, 1.7 misbehaved after a couple of days thne righted itself. apart from uploading and publishing more posts I made no changes to anything on the site. Interestingly WordPress has changed the way it behaves and I have not updated or modified it or any plugins. The change is that clicking preview on a new post no longer opens it in a new tab. It always did. I suspect it may have something to do with the underlying software – I am hosted with HostGator.
[…] Broken Link Checker […]
Hi,
Thanks for your great plugin, two questions :
– Broken link checker can detect link in ACF custom fields ? http://www.advancedcustomfields.com
– How to detect link create with visual composer http://codecanyon.net/item/visual-composer-for-wordpress/242431?ref=alexandreb ?
i’m not use visual composer but my theme use the same schema i think, i can’t detect link created in custom textarea or textarea block.
[…] Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. Versie: 1.7.1 | Door Janis Elsts | plugin site […]
[…] 4. Broken Link Checker […]
[…] Broken Link Checker […]
[…] 4. Broken Link Checker […]
[…] In den Einstellungen kann man festlegen ab welcher Anzahl von Kommentaren der Link des Kommentators auf “dofollow” gesetzt wird. Auch gibt es die Möglichkeit die auf dofollow gesetzten Links auf die Validierung zu testen. Hierfür nutze ich aber ein weiteres Plugin den Broken Link Checker. […]