Broken Link Checker

A WordPress Site Maintenance Solution

A newly discovered (at least by me) plugin to check any and all links on your site is the Broken Link Checker — it automatically checks your posts for broken links and images and reports its findings in the dashboard.

Features

• Monitors links in your posts, pages, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
• Detects links that don’t work and missing images.
• Notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found.
• Also detects redirected links.
• Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
• Link checking intervals can be configured.
• New/modified posts are checked ASAP.
• You view broken links, redirects, and a complete list of links used on your site, in the Tools -> Broken Links tab.
• Searching and filtering links by URL, anchor text and so on is also possible.
• Each link can be edited or unlinked directly via the plugin’s page, without manually editing each post.

Basic Usage

Once installed, the plugin will begin parsing your posts, bookmarks (AKA blogroll), etc and looking for links. Depending on the size of your site this can take a few minutes or even several hours. When parsing is complete the plugin will start checking each link to see if it works. Again, how long this takes depends on how big your site is and how many links there are. You can monitor the progress and set various link checking options in Settings -> Link Checker.

The broken links, if any are found, will show up in a new tab of WP admin panel – Tools -> Broken Links. A notification will also appear in the “Broken Link Checker” widget on the Dashboard. To save display space, you can keep the widget closed and configure it to expand automatically when problematic links are detected.

The “Broken Links” tab will by default display broken links that have been detected so far. However, you can use the subnavigation links on that page to view redirects or see a listing of all links – working or not – instead.

There are several actions associated with each link listed -

• “Details” shows more info about the link. You can also toggle link details by clicking on the “link text” cell.
• “Edit URL” lets you change the URL of that link. If the link is present in more than one place (e.g. both in a post and in the blogroll) then all instances of that URL will be changed.
• “Unlink” removes the link but leaves the link text intact.
• “Exclude” adds the link’s URL to the exclusion list. Excluded URLs won’t be checked again.
• “Discard” lets you manually mark the link as valid. This is useful if you know it was detected as broken only due to a temporary glitch or similar. The link will still be checked normally later.

Have you tried this plugin? Please comment below.