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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[…] viel Speicher. Je Komplexer und aufwendiger das Plugin, umso höher der Speicherverbrauch. Der Broken Link Checker (2MB), Simple Tags (3MB), Redirection (2MB), Twitter Tools (1MB) und die FeedStats (0,5MB) waren […]
I would like the functionality to replace the url to “direct” url. How could I do this quickly?
Something like this is already on my long-term To-Do list, but it may not arrive “quickly”.
[…] Broken Link Checker – this plugin might be very useful if you are worried that some of your old links point websites that no longer exist. Yeah, I know! But you would be surprised. I actually downloaded this plugin to test it and see if it would find broken links in the comments (authors url + urls in comment’s content)- unfortunately it does not do that, it only checks for broken links in the posts, pages, blogroll and some custom fields. So for now it is disabled- but I will keep an eye on it. I really would love it to be able to check for broken links in the comments. […]
[…] Broken Link Checker => Digunakan untuk memeriksa jikalau ada URL yang tidak valid, apakah itu rusak atau dialihkan. […]
[…] Broken link Checker Search engines do not like broken links. This plugin ensures you have […]
very usefull plugin, thanks a lot!
Also- need a ability of bulk deleting of broken links
Version 0.8 has this ability – see the “Bulk Actions” drop-down on the Tools -> Broken Links page.
[…] hab gerade ein total nützliches WordPress Plugin gefunden. Der Broken Link Checker überprüft alle Links, ob sie noch funktionieren und sortiert dann nach broken (404) oder moved […]
[…] Broken Link Checker […]
I submitted a thread at the WP support forum, but thought I’d better mention it here as well. Activating this plugin immediately killed my blog (wp 2.9.1). Both admin and front end went down immediately and never came back until I finally ftp’d into the server and deleted the plugin files.
Now my question is this:
Are the tables in the database that begin with wp_blc_ for this plugin? If so, I’ll delete those tables, since they obviously didn’t get deleted when I had to unceremoniously delete the plugin files via ftp. Anything else I should deal with to totally clean up?
Yes, the wp_blc_ tables are for this plugin. There’s also the “wsblc_options” option that it creates in the wp_options table when it’s activated.
[…] Visit plugin site […]
For some reason this plugin is calling active (healthy) links from yelp.com and archive.org broken. Any known reasons for this?
[…] Broken Link Checker : This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. […]
Some sites intentionally block any HTTP requests that look like they were sent by an automated script. Links to such sites will work normally when you click them, but be reported as broken by BLC.
You can click the “Details” link for each (supposedly) broken link to get more information about why it was marked as broken.
I am using this plugin from past 2 months… never had a problem. Its really awesome and very useful.
I like to ask… are you going to add any new features so that this plugin can also check broken links of ( rapidshare.com, megaupload.com ). This type of link checker has already been developed by phpbb forums – http://forum.zomgstuff.net/showthread.php?t=12979
If this can be also added in the feature… it will be like universal link checker !
I hope it will be added soon. Cheers and Thanks a lot !
This has been suggested before and it is already on my “add that someday” list. How soon it gets implemented will depend on the results of the user feedback survey (which you’ve probably already seen) – the features that were requested by the largest number of users will probably get done first.
I’ll post the survey results on Monday.
I don’t get it: Broken Link Checker keeps reporting a bunch of links as broken and NONE of the them actually are. It’s frustrating because it draws a line through the words of a link that it considers to be broken, yet the links aren’t broken. So I wind up having a bunch of lines drawn through the words of working links. Why is it doing this? How can I stop it? Maybe add a feature where you can choose not to strike out the words even when Broken Link Checker thinks that the link is broken?
You can disable the strike-through by un-checking the “Apply class=”broken_link” to broken links” option in Settings -> Link Checker.
As for the false positives, see my previous comment above.