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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Is it possible to give authors permission to access and fix broken links or is it only available to admins?
@ Denis :
That feature is actually more or less done, but it will be a while before it’s released – there’s a lot that I still need to do for the next “big” release. I should have a publicly available “alpha” version out by the end of this month, though.
@ Bryan :
No, at least not right now. However, users with the Editor role (or edit_others_posts capability) should be able to access the Broken Links page.
Hello having problems with broken link checker the unlink in the plug in will not work need advise as to what I need to do to fix I can’t unlink any broken links.
Tracy Matthews
Any chance you could be more specific? What’s your WP/plugin/PHP version? What exactly happens when you click “Unlink”?
Version 0.9.4.4 When I click on link the wait link comes up and it just sets there
nothing happens
Did it work before?
My first guess would be a JavaScript error, but it’s really hard to diagnose these things via blog comments.
Yes it did worked fine and a update became available so I updated the plug in has not worked since I tried unistalled the plug in and reinstalled that didn’t work.
Diagnose what did you have in mind?
Thanks for this great plug-in, which I rely on regularly. Question: is there a log file I can look at to learn *when* a link broke? I’m interested in reconstructing the history. Thanks.
The link log accessible by clicking the “Details” link in each table row includes this information. Look for something like “This link has been broken for X hours”.
You could also extract this information from the “first_failure” column in the wp_blc_links table if you need the precise time when the problem was detected.
Hi there,
Thank you for a great plugin
I also use vipers-video-quicktags and keep getting that file /blog/wp-content/plugins/vipers-video-quicktags/buttons/%27%20+%20tag%20+%20%27.png is missing though it is there.
I am getting this from a refferer when I edit my own posts when still drafts. The funny thing is that I do not even have any videos attached.
…Sorry, I don’t get it. The plugin doesn’t even check draf posts, so where are you getting the message that the file is missing?
[…] Broken Link Checker […]
Great website man Thanks
very nice work, it works perfect with wp 3.0 – keep it up White Shadow
greetings
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I revisited your plugin and think it’s great! I recommend to check all errors manually though. E. g. if you write “click here” and this text is unlinked automatically by your plugin because the link is broken, it doesn’t make any sense, huh? I’d like to sort errors by error numbers and sources (post and comments) by the way.
Err, the plugin doesn’t automatically unlink anything. By default, the only thing it does to broken links is add a strike-through effect (and you can turn that off in the settings, too).
To actually unlink something, you have to go to the plugin’s page and click the “Unlink” thingy.
Sorting has been suggested before, but it will probably have to wait until after the next major release.