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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reg 884:
Hello White Shadow,
yes, that’s what I meant with “mute” – but I guess a CSS-class for unlinked links would be the better fix for the problem anyway 🙂 So thanks a lot for including it into a future release 🙂
Have a great week!
thaks for this plugin i’ll tray it today great thanks
I just recently found out about cURL, I need to get more information on “where” to put this file after I have the latest version of it. And if it is in zip format, what is the true name of the file.
cURL is a PHP library, a server-side thing. If you don’t know how to update/install it, chances are you’d probably be better off asking your hosting company to do it for you.
Depending on your server and PHP configuration, you would either need to recompile PHP to include the new version of cURL, or drop the appropriate .dll/.so file in the right directory.
[…] Broken Link Checker – “Checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the […]
[…] http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/08/05/broken-link-checker-for-wordpress/ […]
thank you for this useful plugin
is there anyway to deactivate the notification…?
i keep receiving mails even if it is deactivated…
Thx in advance
What notification would that be? The link checker doesn’t send any email notifications, so whatever emails you’re receiving are probably sent by a different plugin.
accept my apologise,
I just figured that the 404 page i set up was sending me those…
So sorry,
best regards…
Hi,
I would like to use your plugin to check my review site to ensure the links are not broken. The links are in a custom field. However, I cannot seem to get the plugin to search this field. Is there any documentation about how to get the Custom Fields section of the plugin to work?
J.M. Snyder
In theory, all you need to do is enter the name of the custom field in the “Custom fields” box on the plugin’s configuration page.
If that doesn’t work then most likely the custom field is in a format that can’t be parsed by this plugin. It only understands custom fields that contain nothing but the link URL (for multi-line fields the URL should be on the first line).
Well, I think part of the problem is I’m not sure what the field name is. I used another plugin to create a custom write panel, and the field name is “Purchase Link.” If I put that in the Custom Fields box, it tries to put it on two lines.
I’ve looked at the MySql table and at the Post page but can’t figure out what the actual field code is. I guess I’ll just fiddle around with it until I get it to work. Thanks though! 🙂
J.M. Snyder
Point of interest – you could get a list of all custom fields used on your blog with this SQL query :
(This assumes you table prefix is wp_)
Unfortunately the space in my custom field name (Purchase Link) still makes the plugin separate both words onto different lines. Thanks for all your help!
Just an FYI ~ I went back and changed the name of my field to Purchase_Link (with an underscore) and it works now. Thanks for the awesome plugin! And for all your help! I’ll be donating a little something to you via Paypal for your help and effort!
Happy holidays!
[…] Broken Link Checker : Un plugin che consente di individuare subito eventuali errori generati da link rotti (i temuti 404) e di correggerli evitando penalizzazioni dai motori di ricerca. […]
I guess this has been requested before but can you check comment link as well? I had people commenting my post 3-4 years ago and probably allot of those blogs have been taken down or change url by now.
Super nice plugin hope you keep supporting it.
[…] Link Checker 0.7 – Now With Search & Filters Behold, a new version of the Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress is available! This release includes the routine batch of bug fixes, two new translations (Spanish […]