WordPress Link Checker
The Link Checker for WordPress uses an external service to crawl your website and find broken links and images on your website.
In contrast to search engine tools like the Google Search Console, which only show if an URL on your website is not reachable, it does not matter for the Link Checker if a link leads to an internal or external URL. The Link Checker will find all dead links.
The Link Checker works for every plugin out of the box. The computation costs for your website is also very low because the crawler does the heavy work and just acts like a normal visitor, who visits all pages of you website once.
Features
- Simple setup.
- Works out of the box with all WordPress plugins.
- Low computation costs for your webserver.
- Lists all broken links and redirects on your website.
- Support for Polylang (probably also WPML) sites.
Technical Features
- Respects your robots.txt file (also the crawl-delay directive).
- You could use the user-agents MB-LinkChecker to control the crawler.
Technical Requirements
- WordPress 4.2 or higher.
- Works with PHP 5.6 and 7.x
Limitations of the free Basic Version
The basic version of the Link Checker is free to use and checks up to 500 URLs. If your website has more URLs, you could purchase a token for the Link Checker Professional, which allows to check up to 500'000 URLs and comes with advantages listed below.
Screenshots
List of broken links found by the link checker
Installation
- Upload the 'link-checker' folder to the '/wp-content/plugins/' directory.
- Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.
- Access the link checker with the "Link Checker" button in the sidebar and use the "Check your website" button to start the process.
- The found broken links will be reported to you immediately when they are detected.
Alternatively you could also download the archive file and install it in the WordPress administration panel under Plugins -> Add New -> Upload Plugin.
Use of an External Server
The Link Checker uses an external server, operated by the developer of the plugin, to crawl your website and detect broken links. This means, that there is some communication between your website and the server. The only data that is communicated to the external server by your website is the URL of your website and the fact that you are using WordPress. The server than crawlers your website (as a normal visitor does) and answers with a list of the found broken links.