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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No known conflicts so far.
Hi,
Thanks for the great plugin.
There is a little bugs in my Chinese-based website. Those files named in Chinese will be discovered as broken link / broken image.
Thanks
Kay
Could you provide a couple of examples?
Mr Jānis Elsts:
Thank you for your attention, I solved the problem.
Your plugin create a file in (…/public_html/wp-content/uploads/.htaccess) and in this file there is 2 codes:
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
this is the problem and after that i deactivate this two codes, the problem’s is solved.
Thank you Again,
I’m glad to hear you solved the problem.
I’d just like to note that this plugin did not create that file; it does not create or modify .htacces files at all. Chances are, it was created by a different plugin or some server security tool.
Hi, after last update I can not activate this plugin due to error:
Fatal error: Class ‘blcConfigurationManager’ not found in /……………./plugins/broken-link-checker/core/init.php on line 59
Installling again did not help.
Hi,
About those files named in Chinese will be discovered as broken link / broken image, please see this page on my site :
http://www.eggstudio.com/%E9%A6%99%E6%B8%AF%E5%A5%87%E6%83%85/
The page file name and the book cover inside this page are named in Chinese, which will be determined as broken link/image.
Thanks
Kay
@Jakub:
That sounds like the plugin files could have been corrupted or not fully uploaded. Did you delete the existing files before reinstalling? If not, try it.
@Kay:
I can’t seem to reproduce the problem. I added a link to that page and the book cover image to one of my test sites and the plugin correctly detected them as working.
In your case, what error message does it display in the “Status” column? Also, click on the message to display additional link details and check the “Final URL” field. What URL does it show there? Does it match the link/image URL?
HI,
I copy the error message to you. This is copied from the notification email.
The Chinese characters become ??????, as follow:
Broken Link Checker has detected 1 new broken link on your site.
Here’s a list of the new broken links:
Link text : Image
Link URL : http://www.eggstudio.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/????-boo…
Source : 《香港奇情》
You can see all broken links here:
http://www.eggstudio.com/wordpress/wp-admin/tools.php?page=view-broken-links
That’s not quite the message I asked about. On the “Tools -> Broken Links” page, what message does it display in the “Status” column?
“Did you delete the existing files before reinstalling? If not, try it.”
Which files I should leave to save info about previous decisions like “Dismiss”?
That info is stored in the database, so manually deleting plugin files will not remove it. However, if you delete the plugin through the “Plugins” page, that will remove its database entries, so in this case it would be better to use something like FTP to do it.
Thanks, it works
I try to use BLC with wordpress Multisite. It works ok on my 1st site but for the second one i have this message:
Broken Link Checker installation failed. Try deactivating and then reactivating the plugin.
Failed to load plugin settings from the “wsblc_options” option.
Option doesn’t exist in the wp_2_options table.
I have tried to deactivate and reactivate but i get the same message. Any idea?
Regards
Chris
Hi,
Sorry that I respond to your question late because I have to wait until the next broken link message shown up.
The broken link shown is : http://www.eggstudio.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/????-book-cover-big.jpg
Status : 403 Forbidden
However, file “????-book-cover-big.jpg” is displayed improper. It is “香港奇情-book-cover-big.jpg”. As I said in previously, the Broken Link Checker doesn’t read Chinese character. It shows ???? that causes 403 error.
Thanks
Kay
@Chris:
Did you network activate it or activate it separately on each site? It will only work properly if it’s activated on each individual site.
@Kay:
Sorry, I’m not sure what could cause that. It handles Chinese characters correctly when I try it on my own sites.
BLC has worked very well for me – but recently it has started showing links as broken (by scoring them out) when they are NOT broken
I have just clicked on them, and been taken through to what they point at
and I am NOT getting alert emails for these as I normally do
something is amiss I think
any ideas?
Check the Tools -> Broken Links page – do those links show up there, and what status do they have?
there are about 500 broken links – and I don’t believe that is true – and they are shown as TIMEOUT
PS – my site has recently been transferred from one server to another