Nothing is worse than linking to some awesome related content from your post, only to find out later that the page has been removed or the website is no longer online and readers who were clicking through were finding a broken link. I don’t know about you, but when I find a broken link on a blog, it immediately lowers my confidence in the blogger.
Don’t be that blogger!
Broken Link Checker by Vladimir Prelovac works in the background on your WordPress website to alert you when a link you’ve added to a post or page becomes broken and is available for free through the WordPress Plugin gallery.
Once you install and activate this plugin, you will find a link to the settings area next to the plugin on the installed plugin page. By default, the plugin will email you every 72 hours if it finds a broken link, giving you a chance to check out the problem and fix it. According to the author, ‘Existing links will be checked this often. New links will usually be checked ASAP’.
General Options
- Frequency of email notifications. Default is 72 hours
- Email notifications can be sent to the administrator or to the author of the post. Default is to notify the administrator using the email address in Settings–>General
- Apply custom formatting to broken links. Default is on and the default CSS will put a line through the link
- Apply custom formatting to removed links. Default is off
- Stop search engines from following broken links. Default is off
- Suggest alternatives to broken links. Default is on
- Show uncertain or minor problems as ‘warnings’ instead of ‘broken’. Default is on
Look for Links In
- Choose where the plugin will check for broken links. Default is comments, pages and posts but any custom taxonomies are available
- Choose which post statuses the plugin will check. Default is published
Which Links to Check
- Default link types are HTML links, HTML images and embedded YouTube videos
- Option to exclude specific URLs within your website
Protocols and APIs
- Default APIs are basic HTML and the YouTube API
Advanced Settings
- Change the timeout before a link is considered broken. Default is 30 seconds
- Run continuously when the Dashboard is open. Default is on
- Run hourly in the background. Default is on
- Show the dashboard widget. Default is editor and above
- Show link actions. Defaults are: edit URL, unlink, mark not broken, dismiss, and recheck
- Max execution time. Default is 420 seconds
- Server load limit. Only available for Linux-like systems
- Target resource usage. Default is 25%
- Logging. Default is not enabled
- Log file location. Default is within the plugin directory
- Forced recheck. An option to recheck the entire website.
