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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Thank you so much for your help — your fix worked!!
It found 2 broken links, which were actually broken….and I love the opportunity to go back and tweak my old blog posts, which is why I love your plugin. That, and how it helps keep me “in good” with Google, of course.
Thanks again — I really appreciate your help.
Laurie
Hmmmm…..maybe now it’s working TOO good. It’s giving me a list of all the broken links from my comments section — from readers who commented on my blog, left their url, and whose blogs are now defunct.
I suppose I could just go in and delete those url’s. Is it worth the time? That is, does Google count the broken url’s in the comments section when determining how “strong” a blog is?
If it’s not worth the time it takes to delete those url’s, is there a way to stop Link Checker from checking the comments section?
Thanks,
L.
Hmm, I imagine broken comment links wouldn’t have much weight since they’re usually nofollow’ed anyway.
At the time, there is no way to stop the plugin from checking comments. Such a feature may be added in a later version.
[…] | 14 Comments リンク切れのURLを探して教えてくれるWordPress プラグインBroken Link Checkerで […]
I upgraded Broken Link Checker to 0.9.1 and got this error message:
WordPress database error: [Unknown column ‘instances.raw_url’ in ‘field list’]
SELECT instances.raw_url FROM wp_blc_instances AS instances JOIN wp_blc_links AS links ON instances.link_id = links.link_id WHERE instances.container_type = ‘post’ AND instances.container_id = 1103 AND links.broken = 1 AND parser_type = ‘link’
In the plugin file: broken-link-checker/includes/containers/post.php is the sql-statement with instances.raw but the table definition of wp_blc_instances contains no field with the name raw_url.
Try this : deactivate the plugin, delete the wp_blc_instances table, then reactivate the plugin. It should recreate the table with the new field(s). You will also need to click the “Re-check all links” button afterwards.
(The plugin should’ve done this automatically when it was upgraded, but apparently something went wrong.)
I’m getting a fatal error on any blog where I respond to the “update” message
What does the error say?
Great plugin! Thank you very much for your work!
Here I want to submit some kind of error of the plugin: Broken Link Checker seems to wrongly treat URLs with CSS classes added. For example look here: http://born66.net/?p=2662 you can see line-through my second link with word ‘Wyborcza’ – though the link is working and valid. Main reason is simply this: my link has ‘class=”html”‘ attribute. Links without CSS addons are checked good …
Please – make some corrects to your usefull plugin.
Thank you!
This problem has nothing to do with CSS – it’s actually caused by the plugin needlessly encoding all commas in URLs. I’ve fixed it in the development version.
[…] Broken Link Checker Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.Janis Elsts This plugin creates an area on your dashboard that reports any broken links it finds — any sites that you’ve linked to that are no longer there, or resources that get 404 errors. Then you can go through and relink or ignore them as you like. Keeps your site tidy. You can also give it permission to cross out links that don’t work so your visitors know not to bother to click through. […]
Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Timestamp: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:35:37 UTC
Message: Expected identifier, string or number
Line: 856
Char: 2
Code: 0
URI: http://test.positivereform.com/wp-admin/tools.php?page=view-broken-links
[…] und mich auf wenige essentielle Funktionen beschränkt. Im Einsatz sind mittlerweile der Broken Link Checker, das Noindex Steuer Ding, wobei ich auf die nofollow Funktionalität gänzlich verzichten werde, […]
That really doesn’t tell me much, as the reported line numbers can vary wildly depending on what other plugins you have installed. Could you post the actual contents of “line 856” instead?
[…] טבעי ובמסך מלא בוורדפרס). במהלך הזה החלטתי להתקין תוסף חדש שמוצא קישורים שבורים. מסתבר שבאתר היו מעל ל- 100 קישורים שבורים. בתהליך העדכון […]
[…] Broken Link Checker – monitors and notifies you for broken links on your blog. […]
I love this plugin. However, will there be a future option in the bulk changes that allows a user to select “ignore broken links”? The links that are listed are not broken on my website. Some of them are generated based on searches.
Thanks!
I’ll add it to my to-do list.
Thanks so much!
[…] I installed a new Plugin called, Broken Link Checker. I figured it would be a good idea, for surely none of my links were broken anyway, but it […]