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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@Giovanni:
That link doesn’t show a 404 for me. Could you give a different example?
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Awesome plugin! Thank you so much for it. Really helps me keeping those years old entries up–to–date 🙂
As I recently switched to writing in Markdown, may I have one feature request? When enabling “plain text url checking”, those Markdown links are reported to be wrong, as they tend to end in a closing bracket, e.g. [Link](http://example.com) – and, of course, example.com) isn’t a working link.
Thank you so much again!
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@Elf: Thanks for the feedback. I can’t promise anything at this time, but I’ll add your suggestion to my idea list 🙂
[…] Broken Link Checker – Monitora e avisa sobre links quebrados em seu Blog, ajudando assim no posicionamento de seu blog no Google. […]
Hi,
I love this plugin. But the latest version combined with the latest version of SEO Ultimate seems to cause the dashboard and some of the admin pages to break – I’ve tested compatibility with different installs and deactivating other plugins, but it’s just the two that don’t seem to play well together.
Would love to use both together if you have any suggestions =)
Thanks,
– Aaron
I’ve set up a test blog (WP 3.3.1) and installed both plugins, and I’m not seeing any broken admin pages or errors anywhere. How exactly does the problem manifest on your site? Also, are there any relevant error messages in your server’s error log?
[…] Broken Link Checker — When I first installed this plugin, it found over 80 broken links — YIKES! I took an afternoon to fix them all… and now, any time I have a broken link, it alerts me on my WordPress dashboard and I can fix it ASAP. […]
Thanks for the reply Janis.
I sent my server logs over to my webhost and they did something on their end and voila – all working again. They didn’t say what it was, but I’m going to guess it was something memory related.
– Aaron
[…] Страница плагина: http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/08/05/broken-link-checker-for-wordpress/ […]
[…] Broken Link Checker – Verifica se o seu blog tem links quebrados e se falta alguma imagens e gera uma lista. Visitar o site do plugin […]
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[…] Broken Link Checker – Verifica se o seu blog tem links quebrados e se falta alguma imagens e gera uma lista. Visitar o site do plugin […]
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