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 all of your help and tips. I hope my feedback is helpful.
The Broken Link Checker seems to be fine now. 🙂
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Hi There!
I use this plugin and am very satisfied. I think my site is being hacked, and I think your plugin is helping me to find this. It’s currently indicating that I have over 150 links in the work queue, but I do not see any pending posts in my site. Where does the tool check through to find links in work queue?
Scarry to be hacked… 🙁
Sepi
The “work queue” here refers to the plugin’s own internal queue of links that need to be checked (or re-checked) at this time; it has nothing to do with pending posts. And it’s certainly not an indication that your site is being hacked 🙂
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I enjoy the links checker, however, I’ve noticed a systematic error that the plugin is making. I have links to the site http://www.tigersandstrawberries.com, and all the links are working (hand-checked). However, the plugin identifies them as broken and draws a line through them.
Here’s the actual post location: http://www.chileunderground.com/2008/08/14/august-f-bom-tigers-and-strawberries/
The broken-link details include notification of error 412, precondition not met. I’m now looking through all the other links the plugin found to be “broken” looking for more instances. Is there a workaround to keep these type of “broken links” from being mis-identified?
The Chile Doctor
At first glance the 412 response code seems like a fairly sure indication that the site in question is running some kind of anti-bot script that’s blocking the plugin. I’ll run some tests later to make sure, but it’s probably the most likely answer.
As far as I know, there isn’t much I can do to prevent the plugin from being detected as a web crawler/bot/an automated thingy – in a sense, it actually is those things.
Great Plugin – love it, I was shamed by the amount of broken links by blog had.
I just wanted to thank you for your quick response the other day. I asked about the work queue (mistakenly thought I was being hacked). Thank you for responding right away!
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Thanks a lot for this plugin! Installing it right away!
HI there,
I have just installed last relase of your plugin (0.5.10), but unfortunatly give me some error like this follow, on the page where linkchecker has find broken url…
Warning: html_entity_decode() expects parameter 2 to be long, string given in /home/luxemoz1/public_html/wp-content/plugins/broken-link-checker/highlighter-class.php on line 62
can you chek please
thanks
G.
Oops, that was a really silly bug/typo. Should be fixed now (might take a few minutes/hours before the update shows up on wordpress.org).
Hey…really fast support! Thanks 😀
I have just installed the last version (0.5.11). But I had to deactivate the plugin because of this warning:
Warning: is_writable() [function.is-writable]: open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/tmp) is not within the allowed path(s): (…) in (…)/wp-content/plugins/broken-link-checker/core.php on line 2055
(…) I deleted the paths
Version 0.5.9 works fine for my blog. Could you check this please?
Diego, you’re not alone. I started getting that error with 0.5.10 and when 0.5.11 appeared I was pleased because I thought it would contain a fix. Unfortunately the problem persists. I’ve got it disabled now as well.