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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A very useful plugin!
I have found one small hitch though: I have a number of code examples (enclosed in
Thanks.
Yes, that seems doable. I’ll add it in the next version.
By the way, if you want the <code> tags show up in the comments here, you’ll have to write the angle brackets as < and > 😉
While I don’t have the means to donate, I have put this plugin on my ‘whats new’ page and suggested WP users get it and install it.
I had to reinstall wp a few months ago after I hiccuped the mysql database. Many of my pages have links on the page to other parts of the blog. I felt just the category listing would mean too many clicks for viewers. So… the static links I had were out of sequence. I had corrected over 100 by hand over 3 months. This plugin found all of the remaining bad links I had been searching for in less than a day, 120 of them.
Thanks for a great plugin !
Thank you 🙂
[…] currently into the broken link hunt here at Deuts.NET. Thanks to the Broken Link Checker plugin by Janis Elsts, finding those broken links is a breeze. Two years into blogging, there will […]
[…] Broken Link Checker der im gesamten Blog auf defekte Links prüft, funktioniert leider noch nicht. Er lässt […]
Truly excellent. A sincere thank-you.
[…] Broken Link Checker […]
I had moved a lot of my photos in my gallery which my blog has about 100 links to, therefore I probably have about 100 broken links. However there seems to be a limit to how many you can see on the broken link page. After you have fixed those it doesn’t show the other broken links.
So right now it says I have 26 broken links but my broken links page is blank. I did fixed 20 of them yesterday (it said there was 46 broken links then). I tried clearing cache and logging out but the page is still blank. So how do I fix the other 26 broken links?
[…] tome diversas ações a respeito. Trata-se do “Broken Link Checker“, desenvolvido pelo W-Shadow.com, o qual já está instalado e funcionando aqui no Open2Tech. […]
There is no hard-wired limit to how many links the page will display.
Do you mean that it says somewhere that you have 26 broken links, but doesn’t display them on the “Broken Links” page (even after you refresh it)? I can’t think of any way that could happen.
A few things that might provide some clues :
* If you delete a post, all the broken links from that post will be gone, too (as you’d expect).
* When you edit a post all of it’s links (even those that you didn’t change) are removed from the “Broken Link” list and re-checked as soon as possible. This may take a while if there are a lot of links to check.
* Theoretically, in very rare circumstances, it is possible for the broken link table become desynchronized from the “posts” table. In this case, deactivate the plugin, activate it again and click “Recheck All Links” in the “Options -> Link Checker” page. This is pretty much the same thing as reinstalling the plugin, and should fix any discrepancies.
[…] Broken Link Checker 0.3.5 » Janis Elsts (url) Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. […]
Hi
I am getting an internal error 500 since upgrading to the new version of broken links. It shows all over the palce in admin panel. I had no problems with plugin until recently it worked like a dream – see error below:
[www.lets-makemoney.co.uk] [Sun Apr 13 18:19:04 2008] [error] [client 86.146.73.230] Premature end of script headers: wsblc_ajax.php, referer: http://www.lets-makemoney.co.uk/wordpress/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=broken-link-checker/broken-link-checker.php&updated=true
I have had vaiorus problems wit the plugin dashboad too like plugins not auto updating on request and activating a plugin and going back to find it deactivated? I am using wp 2.5.
Some strange behaviuor which from the sounds of this board otehrs have experienced too? Any ideas? thanks muchly 🙂
I think I made no changes to the wsblc_ajax.php file in the new version, so it shouldn’t be suddenly crashing now. The error message also doesn’t explain much. If it wasn’t linked to the update I’d suspect server configuration or some kind of incompatibility…
[…] Broken Link Checker—A perennial problem on my (and any other) site is that it has links to many other web sites, and those web sites change over time. The Broken Link Checker scans all new posts (and periodically scans all old posts) and reports any broken links to me, giving me the opportunity to either remove or change those links so my readers don’t get 404 errors. Very cool. […]
Great plugin. One problem – when I activate it, the drag & drop feature of some of my other plugins (pageMash, FAQ-tastic) stop working. Any idea why?
I guess there’s some kind of JavaScript conflict (Prototype vs JQuery). I’ll see if I can find it.
I move my data to new host and lot of images links missing, thank to Broken Link Checker that solve my problem, thanks author for your great job.
Great plugin. Found a bunch of false positives, all of which are links to wikipedia, but a couple other links that were actually broken. Well worth the trade off of occasionally getting a false positive.
175 and counting (but I have > 12,000 posts going back 4-1/2 years).
I’m certain I’m just missing it, but I can’t find where I “can set a different time period.” Not that I want to, I just wondered.
Also I don’t see the strike out, which is cool, documented. Am I just missing that too?
Good work. Thanks.