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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Hi, Janis.
Here’s a page that is identified as having broken links: http://agardenforall.com/about-kathy/. There are two breaks on the page http://184.173.195.222/~hhfarm/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Bio-Pix.jpg and http://184.173.195.222/~hhfarm/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Bio-Pix-198×300.jpg.
Obviously, the links were changed somehow from the domain (http://agardenforall.com) to the IP address, but I have no idea why…
These are images that all worked previously.
I am manually updating the links so that they point to the domain now, but don’t know why they suddenly aren’t working (or if they were changed somehow).
Hi, I use the WordPress version 3.5.2 Dutch and updated the plugin to version 1.8.1 . But Wordfence fot WP tell me that ther is a problem (see bolow)
Filename:
wp-content/plugins/broken-link-checker/languages/broken-link-checker-ar_AR.po
Bad URL:http://englize.com/
File type: Not a core, theme or plugin file.
Issue first detected: 6 mins ago.
Severity: Critical
Status New
Can U inform me how I can resolve that problem.
@Johan Blomme:
same here, there three files where englize.com is mentioned.
Apparently these are the files for the Arab translation, which you don’t use in the Dutch version of WP
That englize.com site seems to be blacklisted, probably distributing malware.
I simply removed the offending files via FTP from broken link checker.
[…] doing this by hand. My tool of choice is the Broken Link Checker for WordPress. The free plugin is annoyingly vigilant, allowing anyone who’s good at chores […]
Hi Janis, Today I received a new update for the broken link cheker version 1.8.2 and after the update Wordfence say congratulations there are no problems found.
thanks for the quick fix.
greetings from Belgium.
@ Tara:
Those links look broken from this end, too. I’m not sure how or what could have replaced the domain names with IP addresses, but that’s probably what caused them to break.
The plugin itself won’t change your links unless you actually use one of its editing features like “Edit URL” or “Fix redirects”.
(Sorry for the late response.)
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Your style is unique in comparison to other people I have read stuff from.
Many thanks for posting when you have the opportunity, Guess
I will just bookmark this page.
I am using standard html on my workpress site but am getting the broken link status for my anchors:
some header
some header
Does this surprise you? Any ideas?
Yes, that is surprising. I’ve done multiple tests with anchors on my own sites and the plugin never flagged them as broken unless the rest of the link pointed to a missing page (like “http://example.com/notfound.html#anchor”).
On the “Broken Links” page, what URL(s) does the plugin display for those anchor links? Do the URLs look correct to you?
Also, you can click the error message displayed in the “Status” column to get additional details about a link and the reason why the plugin marked it as broken. Most of it is pretty technical, but sometimes it can help figure out what caused a false positive.
I believe everything published was very reasonable.
However, think on this, suppose you were to
create a awesome headline? I mean, I don’t wish to tell you how to run your blog, however suppose you added something to maybe grab folk’s attention?
I mean Broken Link Checker for WordPress | W-Shadow.com is a little plain.
You ought to peek at Yahoo’s front page and note how they create news headlines to grab people to click. You might add a video or a picture or two to get readers excited about what you’ve
got to say. In my opinion, it could make your posts a little bit more interesting.
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I had to disable your plugin for my website as it was preventing me from uploading images to my blog. Every attempt at uploading an image failed with the message “An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later.”
No further explanation from WordPress or anything in my server logs.
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[…] Broken Link Checker […]
I was wondering if an option could be added to check the page returned for some specific content.
I have noticed that where I link to the main page of a website, that when the website is no longer a valid site, i.e. the site owner is not using in, and it becomes a spam advertising site, or another owner takes on the sute, or in the case of a moonfriuit site, the moonfruit page which says the site is no longer there.
Possible the way to seed the test would be to use the anchor text, and then letting you edit the text and saving this in your scan database. This of course would have to be optional feature.
Hola. Yo instale el plugin pero solo me revisa 30 link de mis 2000. ¿Algo que se pueda hacer al respecto? Gracias!
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Hi
I’ve installed this plugin, but unfortunately, this plugin detects all links as a broken link in my website and now, no picture and no links does not work correctly in my site.
as a sample see below link
http://www.taminpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/1_15_Optimization2.pdf
That link shows up as “403 Forbidden” for me, and so do a few of the images on your site that I checked. Are you using some kind of hotlink protection script, or have you recently enabled any server settings that are supposed to prevent visitors from viewing or downloading your images directly? If not properly configured, they could cause errors like this.
By the way, if you’re worried that the plugin might be causing it, you can temporarily deactivate it and check if images and other links start working again.
Hi,
I was wondering if there are any known issues with this plug-in working on WordPress V3.6? I’d very much like to use this plug-in if it works.