Broken Link Checker — A WordPress Plugin to Clean Broken Links in Your Posts and Pages
Sites and pages come and go. If you link to a press release, blog post, or any other information online, you know it will not always be there when you want them later.
Bloggers make mistakes every so often. A small mistake may break the link to other page and that is certainly not avoidable.
In 2006, Matt Cutts said that broken links will not impact search rankings. However, that may or may not have changed over the years. At least, it degrades the quality and experience people have on your site or blog.
Why Do You Need Broken Link Checker?
The problem is, checking all the links in your blog posts and pages can take a great amount of time. That is certainly not the kind of tasks you want to get involved on regularly. As your blog grows naturally, it may take hours or even days.
For example, if a page is currently unreachable because the web server hosting the domain doesn’t respond, you may have to make a note and check back later.
How could it help you if you have a simple plugin that allows you to search for broken links in your blog posts and pages automatically in the background?
That’s exactly what Broken Link Checker does, and more.
Features of Broken Link Checker
The plugin will monitor your blog at a predefined interval, looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.
Here are the features of current version:
- Checks your posts (and pages) in the background.
- Detects links that don’t work and missing images.
- Notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found.
- Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
- Link checking intervals can be configured.
- New/modified posts are checked ASAP.
- You can unlink or edit broken links in the Manage -> Broken Links tab (experimental).
Installation
- Download the broken-link-checker.zip file to your local machine. The file name may include version number.
- Unzip the file.
- Upload broken-link-checker folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins‘ menu in WordPress.
The default option is to check every post every 72 hours (3 days). Personally, I think that is unnecessary. I use 720 hours (30 days) for this blog instead.
It also marks broken link with a custom CSS, which you can define in the text area.
A blog minimizes the number of broken links but they usually appear in blog posts, pages, blogroll, widgets and other places where you are entering the links manually. Only posts and pages are checked by Broken Link Checker but still this is a great plugin to have as it automates the process and save you a lot of time.
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