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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The latest version (1.2.4) doesn’t appear to support shortcodes for anything except a href=”uri” links. I’m using shortcodes in image links too, e.g. [blogurl uploads]images/somepic.jpg, so it would be nice to support shortcodes there too.
All right, I’ll add that in the next version.
I get the following error, but I don’t see any option to update the plugin’s database tables. How do I update them?
Error: The plugin’s database tables are not up to date! (Current version : 4, expected : 5)
Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/nemock/public_html/wp-content/plugins/broken-link-checker/core/core.php:417) in /home/nemock/public_html/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 890
Try deactivating and reactivating the plugin.
That worked–thanks!
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Would this plugin make the backend (dashboard) chug while it looks for links? Mine either experiences timeout, or the page is blank once it loads. (Apparently my front end loads just fine though) Sometimes I can get to the dashboard by reloading the page, but I can never get past the dashboard. It also has a network error in the dashboard widget (when I’m able to view the dashboard).
Thanks!
Yes, that has been known to happen to some users. Still no idea how to fix the slow-down though, sorry.
It might be because I haven’t checked for broken links in… oh… a year? haha
So it’s probably okay to just let it run until it sorts itself out?
Thanks! 🙂
Indeed, it should level out eventually.
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