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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This plugin completely disabled my site also Donna. I have ftp deleted the plugin but have yet to see my site come back on. Any suggestions on how to get my site up and running again. 🙁
I am now headed to my database files to delete them but I am not an experienced user with them, so wish e luck.
My site is up and running again. I just had to republish my homepage fro some strange reason. It’s unfortunate I couldn’t use this plugin, but you know, stuff happens.
Do you think maybe it’s a server issue? I use
Apache version 2.2.13 (Unix)
I’m sorry about that, but I’ve never been able to quite figure out why this happens. Still, I would guess it’s something to do with your server. How loaded is it? Are you running on shared hosting, or something else?
With WP 2.9 and the previous version of BLC, I had no problems. At some point since I upgraded WP to 2.9.1 and the plugin to the latest version, I am getting tons of false positives. Every single one is an internal link to either a subdomain of my site or the main site. I get the following message for each link:
1. Log : === First try : 0 (No response) ===
Trying a second time with different settings…
=== Second try : 0 (No response) ===
Link is broken.
(Most likely the connection timed out or the domain doesn’t exist.)
Any ideas?
You could always try downgrading to an older version to see if it helps. Though I doubt it would, as the he last three versions of BLC didn’t change anything in the checking algorithm. Still, it might be worth a try anyway, as it would help isolate the problem.
Downgraded to 1.7.1 with no luck. Strange that the server isn’t responding to internal requests. Where should I start looking?
Thanks for an otherwise great plugin though!
[…] Broken Link Checker. This plugin continually checks all the links (past and present) on your blog entries and validates that no links are broken. I have over 600 links in my blog thus far, so this is a great plugin for me (this post alone has 29 links). Sometimes pages disappear and links in your old posts no longer work; this plugin keeps you from having to constantly re-check all of your links. It runs in the background and is not visible to readers of your blog. […]
White Shadow.
I’m thinking it is my server. I’ve had great success with my host but it does seem to lack in some areas. For example. For both my sites I used a program called Xenu to check for broken links and to check for google trying to index files that don’t exist; the first site it worked and I was able to pinpoint the problem, but then I could not access my site for about ten minutes after.
I ran it on the site I tried to install your plugin this morning and watched my server load. (after I told xenu to go easier on the threads) Within three minutes my server went from a green check to a red check, telling me the load doubled.
It’s unfortunate because I love my host, but I get the feeling with my traffic growing everyday, I am going to be forced to eventually look for a better host. I use Hosting24.
That’s what I suspected. I think I’ll eventually add an option to suspend link checking if the server load goes over a user-specified threshold. Perhaps that will help with these issues.
Ok, then we are waiting for the result day !
[…] Link Checker Survey Results Last week I invited everyone who uses my Broken Link Checker plugin to answer a user feedback survey. The survey consisted of 11 questions covering a number of […]
Just to let people know, I was getting a lot of false positives until I installed the CURL library. This is because most of my links were Apture links and not direct links. Since I installed the CURL library on my server, this plugin has worked like a charm. It is extremely useful.
Also, anyone who can’t figure out how to disable the automatic strike-through via the options really has no business running a blog. If your PHP, CURL, etc. are up to date, then you won’t have any problems with this plugin.
Great Plugin!!!!!!
This saved me days of work.
[…] Broken Link Checker […]
[…] require more man power. Obviously, no one has patience to do it too. A plugin by Janis Elsts named Broken Link Checker helps you automatically find broken links. The plugin […]
Invaluable plugin but it flags Apture links as broken. I don’t see a way around this.
http://apture.com
Hi White Shadow !
I was very happy to find your plugin and was about to install it until I read the comment above (1007) saying :
“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.”
I don’t see any further comment about that and I’m now a bit scared installing the plugin although I find it VERY useful.
Any idea what happened?
THANK YOU very much for your concern.
Roger
[…] Download: Broken Link Checker wordpress Plugin […]
I have an issue with false positives too and accidentally deleted a link which wasn’t broken after all and it was a paid link. Now, I fear of not being paid by the advertiser because of it.
Is there a way to revert back or recover those unlinked URLs from the post? If there is, how? If there’s none, there should be something similar to WP where trash bins can be used to recover accidentally deleted stuff.
I have an issue with false positives too and accidentally deleted a link which wasn’t broken after all and it was a paid link. Now, I fear of not being paid by the advertiser because of it.
Is there a way to revert back or recover those unlinked URLs from the post? If there is, how? If there’s none, there should be something similar to WP where trash bins can be used to recover accidentally deleted stuff.