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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Hi:
For a couple of months now (I think maybe after an update, but can’t swear to that) Link Checker has done NOTHING. I know that there were some links that were broken, but it is not notifying me of anything. Interesting because prior to that I went through a period when it seemed to be incompatible with “comment Luv” and was tagging every one of the comments that included a link back to a site. Now I get nothing at all, and this has been going on for at least two months.
According to the list of plug ins, Link Checker is activated.
My site is ATravelersLibrary.com, and is run on WordPress.org
@White Shadow Everything is well up to date on the server. And oddly enough everything went back to normal after a day. But that particular site for some reason had been acting up it was like I couldn’t clear the cache on the W3-totalcache. All the others were fine for the most part.
I was ready to uninstall all plugins and reinstall stall them but all was fine the next day.
Thanks for your time
@ Vera : Does it at least list your working links in Tools -> Broken Links -> All, or is that page completely empty?
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Update failed on all my blogs. What happens?
/David
What is the specific problem?
I experienced it too. It was when the point release came right after the other release. It wouldn’t upgrade to the latest point release. I solved it by uninstalling/reinstalling. Mind you, it only happened once.
Just wanted to check back in and thank you for the prompt service and say that my problem with a non-functioning Link checker is gone. I followed your suggestion of deleting and reinstalling and now everything works.
Thanks!
Hi,
I have a number of blogs, running on the same Archlinux server.
Except one or two, BLC failed to update and refused to run even after an uninstall. One or two was updated from version about 0.9.5, most was 0.9.7 or the version just before 0.9.7.
When I deleted the blc_ tables, it runs fine again. There were no error messages in the server logs or from WordPress, apart from the basic message that the update failed.
Hmm, perhaps releasing two updates (0.9.7 and 0.9.7.1) in such a short timespan was not such a good idea. I’ll take this into consideration for future releases.
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Hi there. I installed the Broken Link checker plugin about a month ago when I made the decision to use Blogroll instead of del.icio.us . Today, I got an automated email letting me know about a few broken links. Bloody brilliant! Thanks for writing such a great plugin. I love it! 🙂