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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I updated to 0.3.2 and suddenly every link on my site became “broken” according to the plugin, but when I tried them, they all worked perfectly.
Nothing else changed apart from this update. The previous version worked perfectly.
Seems you’re not the only one to experience this. I’ll download 0.3.1 and 0.3.0 from the WP plugin database (there’s a link for “Other versions”) and try to find which change might have caused it.
On a related note, it seems that this plugin is now getting blocked by Bad Behaviour. Maybe that’s at least part of the problem?….
Hi. I installed the plugin and it appears to work fine with one exception. Once the plugin is activated, my system slows down to a crawl when navigating in the WordPress environment. As soon as I deactivate the plugin, everything is normal again.
It I’m using Version 2.3.3. Any help will be greatly appreciated!
Dana Betz
Oops. Just realized others are experiencing similar problems. Thanks again for any help.
Dana
I don’t know why this happens, but my guess would be it’s something to do with the web browser. Try a different browser and see if it helps.
Graeme Says: March 13th, 2008 at 6:55 am
I updated to 0.3.2 and suddenly every link on my site became “broken” according to the plugin, but when I tried them, they all worked perfectly. Nothing else changed apart from this update. The previous version worked perfectly.
<<< Ditto me
Do you have any plugins/server modules that block bots? Some of them identify this plugin as a malicious bot, and will cause all of your links show up as broken.
Also, try the 0.3.3 version that I just uploaded.
<<>> yes- if Akismet and BadBehavior are what you mean… and it is imperative they stay as well.
<<>> where, please? at this writing 3.2 is linked above and on the WP Plugins Page http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/
thx
RH
Damn, I suspected I had forgotten something. I uploaded the changes, but didn’t update the version information. It’s up now (wordpress.org will take 10-20 minutes to refresh).
I’ve got nothing against Bad Behaviour (which is probably the culprit here). However, I don’t think I’d be able to “fool” it into treating the plugin as harmless, now that BB has started blocking it.
0.3.3 is at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/ now – thx
0.3.3 is working ok for me – no apparent conflicts w BB –
thx
RH
Hi, I’d previously reported issues above that other people experienced (slow crawl, false broken links, etc.). Incidentally, I also have Bad Behavior plugin installed, so maybe that was a reason…
Anyway, you’ll be glad to know that I tried latest 0.3.3 and it seems to be working fine now…. for me. No false broken links, no weird activation issue (message that it could not be activated because it caused “fatal error”), etc. Great.
Thanks for the fixes. And thanks for releasing one of the most useful plugins that has ever been created for WordPress! It should be part of WordPress! 🙂
I just wish there was a feature/plugin that would check author links/any links in comments. I hate promoting broken links.
0.3.3 solved the problem. Only showing the one broken link that is actually broken, no false alarms and the admin pages speed seems fine in Firefox for me. Running several bot-blockers BB, Sabre, etc. and nothing clashing. Yeay 😀
I tried this plugin but its giving me 408 Request Timeout all the time. What am I doing wrong? I mean its taking down my entire website. Any help would be appreciated.
moserw
http://www.nela.in/
@moserw : Maybe your hosting just can’t handle it. I don’t know of anyone who’s had a similar problem :/
[…] Broken Link Checker 0.3.3: Does what it says. When I began, I did not know Yahoo didn’t keep its URLs, and the Marines don’t either. So, I have a lot of broken links. Nice thing is, if the link is broken, it displays with a line through it. […]
it might be an idea to add a notice or remove the download link, of the older version … it had me confused for a bit !
blc is great but its shows me every email-adress as broken link. Is there a feature not to look for emails but only for homepages?
Not yet, but I’ll add something soon. I’ll just make it ignore “mailto:” links.
this is a wonderful idea !
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