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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Thank you for amazing plugin. I would love to donate, is there any donation link?
is it possible to make this plugin to work with wordpress MU. at the moment each site owners have to active the plugin manually. Also is it possible to add features so wordpress multi site admin can check each subdomains external links and internal links from the main website.
Another suggestion – is it possible to add functionality to edit couple of sentence around the external links. so site admin can investigate the link and text around the links. it will help site admin to remove or edit abusing sentence along with the link.
thanks
There’s a donation button on the plugin settings page 🙂
This is on my long-term to-do list. It might get implemented eventually.
This is also on my to-do list, and it’s a bit higher than the Multisite-related stuff. The tricky part would be to decide how much of the post to show, and in what format.
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I like the idea of the plugin but I have been puzzled by the fact that when I’ve checked the 5 or 6 links that were identified as broken, it turns out they were not. Did the recent update possibly fix that?
One of the recent updates fixed a certain kind of “connection failed” false positives, but it is fundamentally impossible to fix all of them. This is because many false positives are caused by server configuration issues – usually the kind of thing that can’t be fixed by a WordPress plugin.
What status code does the plugin display for these false positives? Do the links have anything in common, e.g. do they all point to the same site/
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This plugin is very helpfully, thanks to founder..
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First of all: Thank you for this plugin.
I’m using ‘Advanced Responsive Video Embedder’ plugin. This plugin uses shortcodes. Broken link checker doesn’t check these shortcodes. Is there a solution for this?
An example of a shortcode: [youtube id="r9GL7qL2YxI"]
The only solution possible is to add more code to BLC to make it recognize the shortcode. And that’s generally not very practical since each plugin uses different shortcodes.
You would need to add a custom logic for each type of shortcode and then keep BLC up to date with changes in the other plugins to ensure its shortcode parsing routines keep working.
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Thank you. I appreciate the ease of getting a list of links to repair or delete. I use it on my own sites and another organizations site,
I got lots of mysterious “Unknown Error” false positives from healthy links until I found https://wordpress.org/support/topic/https-unknown-error-solution?replies=1 … Once I installed php5-curl and restarted it, the problem seemed to go away. But it’s a bad bug that the plugin gives these false positives when required dependencies are missing.
Also, please create a proper website for this plugin which includes documentation, a FAQ, and a support forum – then I would consider donating. Comments on a blog post is a lousy support medium, and your uservoice page only seems to support ideas.
Curl is recommended but is not required. The plugin includes a fall-back solution that works fine with most links. However, some sites have a tendency to drop connections and IP-block the sender when they don’t see a certain set of HTTP headers. At the moment, links to those sites can only be checked properly if you have Curl installed.
Hi Janis,
I tried to create a link from my website to a wikipedia page but the two words from my site had a cross right through them (like a broken link).
The link however worked.
I deactivated the broken link checker plugin and it resolved the issue.
When I reactivate the plugin afterwards, I get the same problem again.
Is this a bug and is there a way around it?
It could be a temporary network problem or some other kind of a false positive. Take a look at the “Tools -> Broken Links” page. What status message does the plugin show for that link? Also, what is the link URL?
By the way, you can turn off the strike-through effect by disabling the “Apply custom formatting to broken links” option in “Settings -> Link Checker”.
[…] Broken Link Checker […]