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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‘Ello,
All of the outbound links on my site are redirected for tracking purposes, I was wondering if this plug-in will detect if the link they get redirected to is broken or just check if the page they are originally sent to that does the redirecting is broken
The plugin should follow the redirect and check the actual page. The only situation where it might not work is if you’re running PHP in safe mode or have the open_basedir directive set.
‘Ello,
That’s brilliant I’ll be sure to install this plug-in then, this will be so incredibly helpful to the site account managers at my work and make my job easier to.
Thanks for the quick reply.
I am from Russia, and I try to use your plugin today, and I like it!!! Thanks!!!
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I really don’t like that the plugin automatically started checking my links. I activated the plugin and then clicked on the Settings link to go set things up, and the plugin started scanning on its own. I never got to even set the options because as soon as I saw it had a mind of its own, I uninstalled and deleted it. If you get that fixed, let me know, because I’d really like to use the plugin.
This is not a bug, it’s a feature 🙂 However, I’ll keep your suggestion in mind and might add an option to only check links on-request in a future version.
Salut,
first I want to thank you for your great work. 🙂 The Broken Link Checker is a really useful plug-in!
I wonder whether it’s possible to mute broken links in the “Broken Links Admin Tab”. There are cases in which I would like to keep the link but also a the note that it’s broken. So “exclude” didn’t work for me – at least it looked like it (Did I do something wrong??)
Another possibility would be to add an optional class for unlinked links. Such as “class=”removed_link”, like you offered for the broken links.
Just some ideas 😉 no request…
When you say “mute”, do you mean you’d like the link to show up as broken in the post (i.e. have the broken-link CSS class) but hide it from the “Broken Links” table in the admin panel? That’s not possible in the current version. I’m also not entirely sure it would be very useful, but I’ll add it to my idea list.
I’ll add a CSS class for unlinked links in the next release (or possibly the one after that, in case the next one happens to be a bugfix-only update).
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I just installed the new link checker just an moment ago. I must say it’s an very awesome piece of software that will be great to have for any active blogger.
Broken links on your blog is not an good thing. You lose an lot of creditability with readers, this broken link checkers will solve those problems.
Antonio Coleman ‘TrafficColeman” Signing Off