Having broken links can decrease the credibility of a blog. Of course, there is no way to validate every outgoing links that you have especially if you have hundreds or thousands of posts.
Server goes down, domain name being taken over, and online businesses are closed and chance is that you wouldn’t know when this happens several years after you published a post containing the link. However, how about invalid links caused by your own stupidity? Sometimes we make a mistake when we copy & paste or maybe you are using a plug-in that changes a URL but you’ve uninstalled the plug-in long ago.
With the help of a WordPress plug-in called “Broken Link Checker“, broken links can actually be monitored and dealt with instantly.
Broken Link Checker Features (taken from the features page):
- Checks your posts (and pages) in the background (whenever the WP admin panel is open ).
- Detects links that don’t work and missing images. Checks both internal and outbound links.
- Notifies you on the Dashboard if any problems are found.
- Link checking intervals can be configured.
- New/modified posts are checked ASAP.
After I installed and activated the plug-in, it gave me a report of 45 broken links detected on my blog (out of 621 posts)!
Not bad! Some broken links were actually my fault just like my examples on the introductory paragraph. I had the Download Monitor plug-in installed but I forgot to change the URL after I uninstalled it. Thankfully the Broken Link Checker plug-in reported it to me! It will dedicate a page to list all detected broken links on your blog nicely:
Click to enlarge
Underneath the broken links’ list, you can click on the Details link to find out more about the problem:
Click to enlarge
Fixing the broken link is easy through its shortcuts underneath each broken link:
- Unlink (quickly unlink it – remove the HREF reference)
- Exclude (ignore this link from ever being checked on again)
- Edit URL (fix the link instantly from the same page)
- Or edit the post and let the readers know that the site no longer exists and dereference the link manually.
After the housekeeping with the help of the Broken Link Checker plug-in, I can now happily smile when I look at my Dashboard:
I’d suggest turning the Broken Link Checker plug-in off once you’re done fixing the links as it will eat up some resources to continually check for broken links in the background. When I had it on, HostGator didn’t complain about the CPU & memory usage but it’s always good to be safe!
So how many broken links you’ve got after activating Broken Link Checker (make sure you let it run for a few days)?
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
I think this plugin should be added in the bag of must-have plugins for WP. Fortunately, it found only 6 broken links among about 1000 links on my blog!
.-= Abhinav Sonkar´s last blog ..BlogCamp Pune 2 is on 27th June, 2009 – Will you be there? =-.
Wow, that’s not bad at all, Abhinav
I hesitated to use this plug-in last time because of my old webhost complaining of high CPU usage constantly
I started using this plugin for long time.
Very very useful plugin to check the broker links..
I am sure there will be dozens of broken links for every blog.
If one is skeptic of adding a burden of one more plugin to thier blog, then use this tool to check broken links
http://www.niharsworld.com/2009/05/12/find-broken-links-missing-titles-image-alt-text-xenus-link-sleuth-tool/
.-= Nihar´s last blog ..Download / Watch Heroes Season 3 Episodes via Torrents or Online! =-.
Is this plugin supported by the latest version of WP?
Btw, thank you for this suggestion!
Greetings from Italy
I’m using the latest WordPress and even its beta (2.8.1 Beta). The plug-in works completely fine!
I am using this plugin and it is working perfectly.
.-= Tech @InkAPoint´s last blog ..How Erroneous is Google Search? =-.
Its a nice plugin, but for a shared hosting blogs like most of us the choice of more and more plugins becomes problematic after CPU issues from your webhost.
All that leads finally to stripping off many plugins from the blog.
So may be we can use it once to find the broken links and disable it for say few weeks and check again later periodically.
.-= Avinash´s last blog ..Ultimate list of 50+ top freewares =-.
Yeah. Although I left the plug-in activated on my current hosting
I think it’s hosted on a powerful server
Very helpful! I didn’t realize I had that many broken links until I installed this plugin. I am sure google crawlers must have been mad at my blog for being sloppy for a long time.
Nah..you should be fine
But it’s good to have 0 broken links
This plugin is one of my friend
I am using it since one month back or so, and it works very good to discover the broken links!
.-= Hesham @ FamousBloggers´s last blog ..Stop Earning Money from my Comments on your Blog =-.
I have it deactivated at the moment. I guess I should try activating it again and see whether I have new broken links (I’m sure I do!)
Thank you for this fantastic tip! I found a broken link (a mistype error) on my blog (oh the horror!) I will have to share the love about this great piece of advice. I agree, it’s frustrating to find a broken link on website, especially when you really want to see the article or product etc.
Yes
and visitors don’t normally tell you when there is a broken link on the post, unless if they know you quite well
Great plugin! Fixed a bunch when I first installed it today.
Thanks,
Nik