Using the Broken Links Checker plugin

The Broken Link Checker plugin monitors your website and reports broken links to you. Highly recommended.

If this plugin isn’t installed to your website, download the Broken Link Checker plugin here.

This plug-in monitors your entire WordPress site, constantly crawling through your website, searching for broken links (text or picture links to pages which don’t exist).

It monitors your pages, posts and comments. When broken links are detected, you are usually notified through the WordPress dashboard (if you have the ‘Broken Links’ box displayed – see under Screen Options) and/or by email.

How to fix broken links

After you have been notified that there are broken links, fixing the problem is usually straightforward.

Whilst you can directly edit the pages or posts that contain broken links, you can often solve the issues directly from the Broken Links admin page (found under Tools > Broken Links).

This will contain the list of discovered broken links. Choose to edit the URL to fix a broken link. You can also choose to unlink the link. This removes the link while leaving the text that was linked intact.

If you are sure that a link marked as broken is in fact working, then you can manually tell the plug-in that the link is not broken. Your final option is to dismiss a notification of a broken link. The dismissed notifications will be ignored until its status is changed.

Use common sense

In most cases, you’ll need to check all broken links yourself and act accordingly. Sometimes a web page has a new page address and the link simply needs updating.

In other cases, you may find that the page is no longer available, in which case you’ll need to delete the link (and it’s corresponding text). In some cases you may need to consider deleting the entire page or post.