Broken Link Checker: Monitor and Easily Fix the Broken External Links on Your WordPress Website

If you’ve got one or more external links on your WordPress website, then the free Broken Link Checker plugin is a tool that makes it very easy to check whether those links are still working or not.

Once the plugin is installed on your site, it is able to detect and monitor all of the links in the posts, pages, comments, and custom fields throughout your website. All these external links are then listed in one central location on the admin area of your website.

Any broken links that are detected are highlighted, allowing you to fix, edit, or remove them. One of the great features of this plugin is that you can update your problem links directly from the plugin page, rather than visiting each of the individual posts or pages that contain the link. This helps save a lot of time, and makes the process of keeping your external links up to date much more straightforward.

The Broken Link Checker plugin also has the ability to send out email notifications when an issue is discovered. This allows you to quickly fix any problems as they arise. Through the settings you can decide how often broken links are checked for, which types of links are monitored, and who can view the broken links dashboard.

If you want a free and easy way to keep track of the external links on your WordPress website, the Broken Links Checker is a powerful tool that can really help you out.

How to Use the Broken Link Checker Plugin on Your Website

As the Broken Link Checker plugin is free to use, it can be installed on your site directly from the WordPress plugin directory.

To do so, log into the admin area of your site (http://yoursite.com/wp-login.php) and then navigate to Plugins > Add New using the sidebar menu.

From the Add Plugins screen, enter ‘Broken Link Checker’ in the search field, and then install the first item listed in the results.

Broken Link Checker Add Plugin

Once the plugin has been installed and activated, it can be accessed from the newly added Broken Links item on the Tools sidebar menu.

Managing the Broken Links On Your WordPress Website

From the Broken Links page, you can view all the external links on your WordPress website, which the plugin has detected. These links can then be filtered according to whether they are broken or not.

Broken Link Checker View Links

The link manager makes it easy to quickly see which links are causing problems, as well as where on your site that link is located. The links listed on this page can be edited directly, without having to visit the page that contains the link.

Broken Link Checker Edit Link

You can also remove any of the links at the touch of a button, leaving just the link text in place. If you do want to view the post, page, comment, or other area of your website that contains the link, you can find a link to that area in the Source column.

By clicking on the details link, for any of the issues the plugin has detected, you can view the history of the link and get more information on what the problem might be.

Broken Link Checker Details

Once you’ve dealt with any broken links on your site, the plugin will continue to run in the background and alert you of any new issues as they arise.

Conclusion

The Broken Link Checker plugin is a simple but effective tool that nearly all WordPress users can benefit from. By combining it with a link management plugin, like Pretty Link Lite, you can really make the task of managing the external links on your website much more hands off and streamlined.

If you have any questions about this plugin, or working with WordPress in general, please leave a comment below.

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  1. Hi Joe,

    I always take care of broken links due to its benefits.on website because these disturb the user experience and prevent website to deep indexing.I did not use this plugin before but i will take this plugin into consideration.

    Regards,
    jessica
    Thinsquare

  2. Checking broken links frequently in your site is so important. Only just few broken links can outrank you from Search engine and can also damage your blog or website reputation, so it is important to check broken links on regular basis.

    Really, great tips. Nice plugin. Usually, in my latest blog, I had to manually check those backlinks when I get 404 error. Bt after reading your post I installed a plugin at one of my blogs. I found more than 200 broken links. I fixed all of them by using your it. btw can you tell me, if i have linked my post contents to external sites for reference & source, is this plugin consider that are broken links? Please let me your thoughts.

    Anyways, thank you for such helpful post, really appreciate your efforts for pulling this information altogether.