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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[…] Broker Link Checker for WordPress […]
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[…] Broken Link Checker […]
Broken Link Checker worked fine for a few month. But now, I have some errors. When I run “Re-check all pages”, all the website is in error (error 500) and many good links which point to my website are marked as broken :
Log : === First try : 500 ===
HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 08:07:21 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.X (OVH)
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.9
Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache
Last-Modified: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 08:07:21 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Trying a second time with different settings…
=== Second try : 500 ===
HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 08:07:21 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.X (OVH)
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.9
Expires: Wed, 11 Jan 1984 05:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Pragma: no-cache
Last-Modified: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 08:07:21 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Link is broken.
Why the whole website is out when the plugin is checking all links ?
WP 2.7.1 (Akismet 2.2.3, akWpLightbox 1.0.0, All in One SEO Pack 1.4.7.4, Broken Link Checker 0.4.14, cforms 9.1, Exec-PHP 4.9, FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.3.1, FeedWordPress 2008.1214, Google Analytics for WordPress 2.9, Google XML Sitemaps 3.1.2, MobilePress 1.0.3, Remove Generator Meta Tag 1.0, WordPress.com Stats 1.3.7, WordPress.com Stats Helper 0.5.5.3, WordPress Newsletter subscription Opt-in for SendBlaster 1.1.6, WordPress Related Posts 1.0).
Ah, the mysterious “500 Internal Server Error”. That’s one of the most abused HTTP codes that can mean any number of things. Have you recently installed any security-related stuff on your server (e.g. new Apache modules)? The plugins look fine, but it could be caused by something else that works on webserver level.
Quite difficult to know what has been updated on the web server… It’s a shared hosting ! I will open a case next week to try to have more information or log file.
I will try if this issue is related to the last version of the plugin (try version 0.4.13).
Thanks for your reply !
I have the same issue with version 0.4.13. I have open an incident to have more informations from my hosting provider. It seems my database is limited to up to 3 concurrent access. Any idea ?
Thanks.
That sounds very restrictive, though I have to admit I don’t know much about this aspect of databases. No ideas, sorry.
[…] easy to do with the plugin I use: Broken Link Checker. Highly […]
[…] 13. Broken Link Checker […]
I tried the plugin on a free server for testing,worked great with the 3xx redirects,but now i switched it to my paid server and the plugin doesnt show the redirects anymore.I tried:uninstalling and reinstalling,upgrading,deactivated all other plugins to check for conflict,went thrue the css numerous times,php5 on both servers,but nothing works…Can you come up with anything that could help?Cause i`m going insane ๐
Thanx
Does the new server have cURL? If not, the plugin would use another algorithm to check links that handles redirects slightly differently.
[…] Plug-in: Broken Link Checker is easy to use and allows you to find and fix bad links quickly.ย From the ease of putting the […]
Yes it has curl,i checked with the helpdesk and they gave me this info:
cURL support enabled
cURL Information libcurl/7.18.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8g zlib/1.2.3.3 libidn/1.1
Is that any help?
Well, is the modified code still there? ๐
Are typical broken links (error 404) detected?
[…] Broken Link Checker decreases the likelihood that a link-heavy post like this will become useless to a future reader. […]
Yes the modified code is still there ๐
I imported a old blog and it detected 117 dead links (404) but not the 3xx range ๐
I just cant figure out what the problem is…
Hmm, nothing else comes to mind at this time… :/
๐
The strange thing is that i have another link-check plugin (but it only checks links when a post is actualy visited) that does detect the 3xx redirects.I guess its gonna be a long night trying to figure it out…
[…] Broken Link Checker – Search engines do not like broken links. Your visitors do not like them either. This plugin scans your posts automatically, shows you broken links in WordPress dashboard and lets you easily unlink them. […]