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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Is there anything interesting in the “Details” of the reported links? Maybe YouTube have started using some spambot protection that interferes with the plugin.
I have a couple of links showing as broken due to the way in which they are formed. Is it possible to add an options for exceptions whereby the user lists “links” which they don’t want checked so as to avoid those links appearing as broken links?
@ Gary O : Err, there’s already the “Exclusion list” for that. See Settings -> Link Checker
DOH!!!!
That’ll teach me to look more carefully before making a comment!
I’m so embarrassed.
I am using it, but since I activated WP-SuperCache it throws an Internal Server Error (every second). It looks like the settings for this plugin (.htaccess changed) are interferring the work of your plugin. Could this be and how could I solve this?
Cheers
Sebari
@ sebari : That’s interesting. I’m using WP-SuperCache 0.8.8 myself and I haven’t encountered any problems. In fact, I can’t immediately think of any possible way these plugins could conflict. You might have better luck reporting this issue to the author of WP-SuperCache.
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I always get a broken link message for the following link:
http://www.panasonic.de/html/de_DE/2036940/index.html
but everytime I’m testing the link there are no problems.
Andreas
@ Andreas : Click the “Details” link in the report, there might be some clues there. Other than that, all I can suggest is adding the link to the exclusion list.
@ White Shadow : “Details” says:
1. Log : === First try : No response. ===
Trying a second time with different settings…
=== Second try : No response. ===
Link is broken.
Hmm, this would usually be a temporary error. The plugin tried to access the link and got no response from the target server – not even an error message. This might happen (very occasionally) if the server was overloaded, but if the problem reoccurs then the target server might be actually blocking the plugin, or similar.
Then the server must block the plugin as it happens with every link to this server and always.
I’ll put the server on the exclusion list.
Thanks, Andreas
can you make plugin to check rapidshare, depositfiles … if links are alive or dead
@ Matrix : Probably not. That would needlessly complicate the plugin.
[…] who gladly contribute plugins and one of those plugins that currently serves me very well is the Broken Link Checker plugin. It scours your posts and pages for links that do not lead to working pages anymore i.e. […]
Very nice plugin, I found a bunch of broken links on my blog! o.O;;;
Great plugin!Im allready in love with it!Im testing if it also works on videolinks like megavideo etc.Hope it works cause then i will be using it a lot.So far so good,keep up the good work!
How can i get the links with redirects to be displayed as broken links.
is it just a case of changing
$result[‘okay’] = (($code>=200) && ($code=200) && ($code<300)) || ($code == 401);
Thanks
Craig
Code looks like its working all 302 / 301 redirects are now displayed as broken links, so i can clean them up now 🙂
Thanks for the great plugin
Craig