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-checker folder to you /wp-content/plugins directory.
Activate the plugin in the Plugins tab.

Related posts :

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 22:59 and is filed under WordPress Plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

« WordPress Killed My Code | How To Force File Download With PHP »

2,584 Responses to “Broken Link Checker for WordPress”

White Shadow says:

October 20, 2009 at 12:58

According to PHP docs the open_basedir directive can only be set in php.ini and httpd.conf in your version of PHP. You’d need at least PHP 5.3.0 to set it from a script, so I’m fairly certain plugins/WP can’t change it in your case (PHP 5.2.5).

Maybe open_basedir isn’t the problem here. You could try (re-)enabling redirect detection manually : comment out lines 161 and 163 in link-classes.php like this :
```
//if ( !blcUtility::is_safe_mode() && !blcUtility::is_open_basedir() ) {
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
//}
```
Tinh says:

October 20, 2009 at 13:01

I tried to deactivated and reactivated the plugin but the error on the table is still there
White Shadow says:

October 20, 2009 at 21:39

Did you get an error when reactivating (you should have if it couldn’t create the table)? If yes, what was it?
Dingoe says:

October 21, 2009 at 10:29

for my own WordPress blog I have rewritten the broken-link-checker.php file and made my own broken-link-checker-nl_NL.mo file. I will post this rewritten file and the broken-link-checker.pot file in a zipped file on Rapidshare for those who want a localized plugin.

http://rapidshare.com/files/295841715/broken-link-checker.zip
Wordpress plugins for affiliate websites : Travel Affiliate says:

October 22, 2009 at 00:54

[…] Broken link checker – Helps my users and is good for SEO by identifying broken links within my sites. From the dashboard you can unlink or edit the link to something that will work. […]
Asmodiel says:

October 23, 2009 at 00:08

Hi there!

The Problem with the open_basedir as I’ve written above is not really fixed with the last update. While using the proposed ini_get(’upload_tmp_dir’); it works… Maybe you should really consider changing it 🙂

I could write a german and polish localisation…. 🙂
White Shadow says:

October 23, 2009 at 01:14

Interesting. As a test, could you try switching the order the plugin tries the directories like this (around line 2220) :
```
$path = ini_get('upload_tmp_dir');
if ( $path && is_writable($path)){
	return trailingslashit($path) . 'wp_blc_lock';
}
			
//Try the system-wide temp directory
$path = sys_get_temp_dir();
if ( $path && is_writable($path)){
	return trailingslashit($path) . 'wp_blc_lock';
}
```
The reason I’m reluctant to implement your suggestion exactly as written is because it doesn’t account for other users’ situation. (What if someone doesn’t have an upload dir. set? What if it gets automatically cleared at inopportune moments? Etc.)

So I see there’s great demand for localisation(s). Okay, I’ll get started on that sometime next week 🙂
Michael Garmahis says:

October 23, 2009 at 22:57

I installed this plugin but it immediately paralyzed both backend and frontend. I’d better use Xenu’s Link Sleuth for now.
steve portigal says:

October 24, 2009 at 01:47

re: 823
(more naive questions, sorry) Where do I find link-classes.php? It’s not part of the WP install as far as I can tell…
White Shadow says:

October 24, 2009 at 01:51

It’s one of the plugin’s files, in wp-content/plugins/broken-link-checker/.
Steve Portigal says:

October 24, 2009 at 08:29

Well, I tried that. I rechecked all links and then I created a post with http://chittahchattah.blogspot.com which redirects to http://www.portigal.com/blog

1. Post published on : October 23, 2009
2. Link last checked : October 23, 2009
3. HTTP code : 200
4. Response time : 0.215 seconds
5. Final URL : http://chittahchattah.blogspot.com
6. Redirect count : 0
7. Instance count : 1

1. Log : === First try : 200 ===

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Expires: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 05:26:05 GMT
Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 05:26:05 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate
Last-Modified: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:44:07 GMT
ETag: “5bd197ab-8424-4f4a-aacb-ebb0252da666”
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-XSS-Protection: 0
Content-Length: 0
Server: GFE/2.0

Link is valid.

Debug info:
PHP version 5.2.5
MySQL version 5.0.41-community
CURL version 7.19.5
Snoopy Installed
Safe mode Off
open_basedir On ( /home/portigal/:/tmp:/usr/local/lib/php/ )
Redirects may be detected as broken links when open_basedir is on.
Lockfile /tmp/wp_blc_lock

In other words, it didn’t make any difference. No redirects out of my 7000+ links 🙁
White Shadow says:

October 24, 2009 at 19:49

http://chittahchattah.blogspot.com uses a META redirect, which is not directly supported by CURL and similar libraries.

But that still doesn’t explain why other redirects wouldn’t show up, and I’m running out of ideas. Khm. Okay, here’s one more test – download this archive, unzip it, upload the test_redirect.php file to your server and run it. It should output a bunch of information; paste it here.

The script is basically a greatly simplified variant of the link checking code that tries to load http://w-shadow.com/redirect302.php – a page I created specifically to test redirects – and displays various information about the result(s).
Steve Portigal says:

October 24, 2009 at 20:00

Thanks – Note that I still have the commented-out version of link-classes.php

Fetching http://w-shadow.com/redirect302.php

Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in /home/portigal/domains/portigal.com/public_html/test_redirect.php on line 10
Steve Portigal says:

October 24, 2009 at 20:01

HTTP Header(s)
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:58:40 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.13 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.13 OpenSSL/0.9.7a mod_bwlimited/1.4 PHP/5.2.10
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.10
Location: http://w-shadow.com/
Vary: User-Agent,Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Steve Portigal says:

October 24, 2009 at 20:04

sorry for the multiple comments – the output is in a format that your comment feature doesn’t like, giving me a blank screen upon submit, so I’m snipping out various pieces to see how I can get it to load – I’ll reformat it in Word and see if that helps…

Response info
Array

url => http://w-shadow.com/redirect302.php
content_type => text/html; charset=UTF-8
http_code => 302
header_size => 280
request_size => 67
filetime => -1
ssl_verify_result => 0
redirect_count => 0
total_time => 4.325351
namelookup_time => 4.165701
connect_time => 4.244815
pretransfer_time => 4.244826
size_upload => 0
size_download => 0
speed_download => 0
speed_upload => 0
download_content_length => -1
upload_content_length => -1
starttransfer_time => 4.325252
redirect_time => 0

CURL version info
Array

version_number => 463621
age => 3
features => 1565
ssl_version_number => 0
version => 7.19.5
host => x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
ssl_version => OpenSSL/0.9.8b
libz_version => 1.2.3
protocols => Array

0 => tftp
1 => ftp
2 => telnet
3 => dict
4 => ldap
5 => http
6 => https
7 => ftps
White Shadow says:

October 24, 2009 at 20:34

Right. That warning there – “CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir” – is a clear indication that open_basedir is enabled, and thus redirects don’t work. I was uncertain before, but not any more – this particular error message is generated by PHP itself when a script tries to do something that’s not allowed by the server config.; it can’t be a bug in the script*.

I’ll add a workaround for situations like this. Redirects will show up in the report, but you’ll have to check each one manually to know where it redirects to (because the plugin still won’t be able to follow the redirect).

* That sounded ambiguous. What I mean is the error message shows that the server config. really prevents the plugin from following redirects, as opposed to the plugin just incorrectly thinking it can’t follow them and giving up.
Ricky Buchanan says:

October 25, 2009 at 05:57

Thank you for this unbelievably useful plugin. I’ve used it almost since it was first released and find it really wonderfully useful on my blogs for isolating sites I’ve linked to that have since died or moved. The growth in the plugin during the last 2 years has been spectacular too!

I’m not sure if this is possible, or if it’s just me, etc., but the one thing that really bugs me is that when I’m editing a URL on the broken links page that I can’t just press ‘enter’ to save the changed link – I have to manually click ‘save link’. I am forever forgetting to do that because it seems counterintuitive that ‘enter’ doesn’t work.

The only other tinsy tiny problem I have is that I’d like more documentation – I’m never quite able to remember the differences/effects of “unlink”, “discard”, and “exclude”. Could we have tooltips perhaps for these? I know I’ve looked up the effects a few times but the names aren’t obvious to me so I keep forgetting.

Again, thanks for the hard work you put in – it’s greatly appreciated!
r
White Shadow says:

October 25, 2009 at 11:22

Alright, I’ll see if I can make Enter work in that textbox.

The action links do have tooltips – you just need to hover your cursor over one of them for a few seconds to make a one-line description of the link’s function pop up. This works in all the major web browsers (Firefox, Opera, IE and even Chrome).
Ahmed says:

October 25, 2009 at 23:48

Thanks ,great plugin
Ricky Buchanan says:

October 26, 2009 at 03:28

Ahh – guess the tool tips must be a Safari thing then, it just says “javascript:void(0);” for all the tooltips. Thanks again 🙂

W-Shadow.com