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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@johny : Yep, I know. It only checks the post/page content at this time.
Does the broken link checker check the links in the blogroll(s) (or is it planned for a future development) – ordinary users who are not admins don’t see these type of links to be anything different – they just bitch (sometimes) “It does not work” or go away from your site never to return !!
This is in the long-term To-Do list. It will probably get implemented eventually, but unfortunately I can’t give you a timescale. After all, I’m not paid to update my plugins so the updates happen whenever 🙂
[…] trata de Broken Link Checker, un plugin que comprueba en trasfondo que los enlaces de todos nuestros posts no apunten a sitios […]
There is something wrong when I deleted a post, this message occurs:
“WordPress database error:[You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near”
When I turn off this plugin, it works!
Wow, looks like this bug has been present since the first release and nobody spotted it till now 🙂 I’ll upload a fixed version; you should see the upgrade notice in 12 hours or so.
[…] Broken Link Checker […]
Thanks for the update, my site is now showing no broken links at all, which is what I hoped for! Its great to see an author respond so swiftly to bug reports.
Great Job for the update! Swiftly done!
Now I found this error when trying to edit a post:
Warning: join() [function.join]: Bad arguments. in …/plugins/broken-link-checker/broken-link-checker.php on line 323
I’m not quite sure why that happens, but 0.4.13 might fix it. You can download the update from the link in the post, or wait for the update notification.
I have just noticed this error message on my dashboard
“You don’t have permission to access /wp-content/plugins/broken-link-checker/wsblc_ajax.php on this server.”
I don’t think I’ve changed anything regarding BLC – tried to upgrade to the latest version but I still get the same message. I’m not sure if this means that BLC does not work – there are no reports of broken links .
Judging by the error message, I don’t think this is a BLC problem. Something – like a security-oriented plugin or something in .htaccess – might be blocking the access to that file.
Nice plugin!!!
Any chance that you will add localization to it? That would be nice!
Is there a changelog published somewhere on the net, where users can review changes before upgrading to a new version?
@ BLC : Yes, see the revision log.
@ Georg : Perhaps someday 🙂
Great job! I’m amazed at your working phase 😀
I just found this recently, all the link directing toward en.wikipedia.org is deemed as broken link (it has a strikethrough line in it). Please see it here:
http://netsains.com/2009/03/kalah-teknologi-iphone-tak-laku-di-jepang/
I remember ‘discard’ a link to wikipedia once, but after that I’ve done nothing regardless.
Wikipedia probably thinks the plugin is a suspicious bot and blocks it. There’s not much I can do about it – a big site like Wikipedia will probably have very sophisticated bot traps.
You can add Wikipedia to the exclusion list in Settings -> Link Checker if you don’t want to see those false positives anymore.
The plugin breaks the layout of the admin page when used with PHP 5. I’ve uploaded a screenshot here if you’d like to see.
I use PHP 5.2.6 and I don’t see any problems, Richard. Are you sure that it is not another plugin that causes it?