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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Hello,
First off thank you very much for writng this plugin, great idea! The plugin was working great. But now the pages are not redirecting. In Explorer the pages gets hung up indefinitely, in Firefox it gives this error.
The page isn’t redirecting properly
Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.
* This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept
cookies.
Any ideas of what could have happen? Are there plugins not compactable with Link Cloaker?
Thank you VERY MUCH for your time.
Bert
[…] using any widgets, but… I am using a few plugins: the Broken Link Checker and the Dashboard Widget Manager. (The latter let’s you clear stuff you don’t want to look at out […]
At what interval does it check ? I have it set to 5 seconds for how long it checks, but my blog slows way down for a page request when it is running. If I could set this plugin to run for 5 seconds once every 60 seconds that would be great. This page slowdown is only there when the plugin is active and I’m in the admin panel. I think.
I broke my site during the wp2.5.1 upgrade, reloaded and now the database links have shuffled. So I probably have many broken links or static links that go to the wrong post. I had deleted old posts here and there, and when I reuploaded the database backup, mysql redid the post numbers filling in the blank spots.
Thanks,
D.J.
The option that you can set is how often the plugin is invoked (how often it runs). So if you have it at 5 seconds, it will
1) start up every five seconds (launched by JavaScript from the admin panel)
2) run for five seconds (approximate)
3) repeat from 1. while there are links to check
The intention is to use all the alloted time, so in an ideal case the plugin will run continuously – until there are no more links to check.
If it slows down you dashboard too much, try setting it to very long intervals instead.
thanks, I’ll try that.
White Shadow, you already have everything you need to implement what I mentioned (The click on the link and it shows an input box for faster link fixing). You already have the Regular Expressions in the wsblc_ajax.php file, just make a callback like unlink_link_callback and use a different $matches variable (Maybe $matches[0] I think is the href, not positive), the SQL queries already seem to be fine. The only major change will be adding the input box and all of that, and you can see an example of that in the wp-admin\js\slug.js file, the first function, edit_permalink. This function is the one that shows the input box and all of that.
I’m not trying to say it’s absolutely easy and bashing you for not doing it or anything, I would do it if I had a better understanding of this, just trying to help you out with some clarifications. If you ever want to give it a try, I’ll be glad to test it out for you. Like I said earlier, I’m /positive/ that every one of your users will benefit from this. It’d definitely be faster than having to click edit post for each post and look through the long post to find the link. Not trying to nag or anything though I know it’ll probably seem this way, just trying to show that I really care about this feature enough to investigate.
Ahem. It definitely isn’t easy. I tried, and got weird and unusual MySQL errors that I couldn’t trace to any particular source. Still, I’ve uploaded an experimental implementation to wordpress.org (you should get an “upgrade available” notice in your “Plugins” tab).
Hmm…don’t know what errors you’re talking about, where do you get them and when? I’ve tried the new plugin and it works perfectly, really, I’ve tried it multiple times.
One weird thing is that when I click view post on some of them, it uses my old domain name, only on posts that were created when I had that domain name, but I’m not sure if it’s your plugin’s own doing.
Well, you never know when a bug might crop up ๐
The plugin gets the URL for the “View” link from the WordPress database (using the “guid” filed). Some of your older posts probably have outdated database info. I think.
Yeah I figured that out by viewing your plugin’s source, I simply ran a REPLACE query on the guid table so that’s fixed now. The only problem is that some of the guid’s are of when I used different permalinks (for example /p?=432) and as far as I can tell there’s no way of fixing that (I already tried update permalinks). Oh well, but hey at least your plugin is working perfectly fine. If I ever notice anything then I’ll hit you up.
You should announce this new feature man, I’m positive you’ll get a lot of attention for it and many people will love it. It would’ve been neater if you could do it like the slug editing is: The URL is just text and when one clicks on it it becomes the textbox and when one clicks outside of it or on the save link/button it saves it (If not the former then at least the latter). This would be a lot more intuitive and make for a smoother process. But hey at least it’s working now, perfectly fine too! This suggestion is just as a touch up.
I’ll let you know if anything happens but so far the plugin is working great. If you need anything let me know!
I suspect nearly 30% of my posts are about new plugins/features. So I’d rather skip posting about small updates ๐
Hi,
Thanks for your amazing plugin!
I have a request for an enhancement.
I went through the source code and noticed that the “View” links are generated according to the the GUIDs. This may cause problems on non-English blogs, such as my blog in Chinese. I think using permalinks is a better approach. Hope this helps!
Thanks again.
Regards
Leo
Ahha, and how do I get the permalinks? (It’s probably not extremely hard, but I didn’t figure it out when writing that code)
You can probably use get_permalink, giving it the post’s ID as the parameter. This function is provided by WordPress core.
Anyway I’ve not tried that yet. Good luck with that! We can find a way out together if you are faced with any coding problem. ๐
Interesting, that seems to work. I’ll have a new version up soon, thanks ๐
Yeah I was about to tell you to do what Leo said, it’s definitely better and more logical.
hey white shadow, as mentioned in my pioneer (around 10 to 20) comment earlier in the development of your genius plugin – I do still get the unlink error.
only occurs with images (wikipedia and my own), do you have any idea how to fix that?
cheers,
jez
I didn’t figure it out at first, but now I know it doesn’t work because I haven’t added any specific “image-unlinking” code. So the “Unlink” button only works for links.
Maybe one day ๐
This is a very cool plug-in but I’m having some trouble with it. It’s constantly reporting many valid URLs as if they were invalid, aside from catching the occasional invalid one. I’ve experimented with the settings to no avail. I’m running 2.5… Any suggestions? Thanks
It’s possible that those links that are incorrectly reported as broken point to websites that employ some kind of anti-bot protection, which might block the link checker. This has already happened before.
Another possibility is that the “broken” links load very slowly, so the connection times out and the plugin assumes the links don’t work.