Word­Press Bro­ken Link Checker Plugin

Bro­ken links aren’t fun. They can destroy a user expe­ri­ence, espe­cially if they link to an impor­tant down­load or file. Luck­ily, there’s an easy way for you to keep track of your dead links in Word­Press. It’s a plu­gin called the Bro­ken Link Checker.

Bro­ken Link Checker keeps a run­ning list of all the bro­ken links found in your posts, pages, blogroll, com­ments, and cus­tom fields. It also allows you to eas­ily man­age those links from one screen within the Word­Press admin (Tools > Bro­ken Links).

The plu­gin has many more features:

• Mon­i­tor links in your posts, pages, the blogroll, and cus­tom fields
• Detects links that don’t work and miss­ing images
• Dash­board updates for bro­ken links
• Redi­rected link detection
• Changes appear­ance of bro­ken links in posts; the default is to set the text dec­o­ra­tion to strike through
• New or edit­ted posts are checked immediately
• Man­aged through the Word­Press Admin under the Tools -> Bro­ken Links
• Links can be removed or changed through the plugin’s page, with­out man­u­ally edit­ing each post

This solu­tion has helped me clean up 15 bro­ken links on kevinleary.net, improv­ing usabil­ity, user expe­ri­ence and search engine opti­miza­tion. I rec­om­mend any­one with a large Word­Press dri­ven web­site con­sider using this plu­gin to keep track of bro­ken or dead links.