Broken Link Checker by Janis Elsts is one of the most useful WordPress plugins any blogger could use.
If your blog is just a few weeks old and you have been posting on a regular basis, the chances are there are already one or two broken links within your pages. If your blog is a few months or even a few years old, you are likely to be linking to lots of pages and images that no longer exist. This isn’t your fault. People change and update their websites all the time. The problem is knowing which links are broken. The solution is to check the Broken Link Checker report on a regular basis to see what isn’t working and decide upon a solution.
When the plugin is installed and activated it will run an initial check of your blog posts and report on any broken links it finds. The analysis will appear in the dashboard:
Clicking the link will take you to a more indepth analysis which provides you with several options on how to deal will the broken links.
There are four columns:
Source : This is the post which contains the problem link (you can edit, delete or view the post from here)
Link Text : This shows the text which contains the broken link
URL : This contains the link (you can see further details of the post, unlink the broken link, exclude the url or edit the url)
Discard : Is the final column which allows you to remove the broken link report from the analysis
When I ran the Broken Links Checker for the first time it found 14 broken links. Most of these links were to news stories which had been archived by the original site, there were a couple of links to flickr images which had been removed, a few more where linking to pages that had been moved by the site owner and there were a couple of boken links which had never worked because of spelling mistakes on my part (naughty!)..
The action I took depended upon each post; a couple of my posts were deleted as I felt there wasn’t much point in keeping them if the original news story could not be read, I corrected the spelling mistakes and links that were linking to the pages that had been moved, and most of the other broken links were ‘unlinked’, which means the text returned to just being text and were no longer a link. There were one or two broken links which I left in place as the sites could not be accessed at the time and I assumed they were experiening a temporary problem.
Without this plugin it would be a nightmare to check a blog for broken links. The Broken Links Checker report sits in your dashboard and checking it from time to time will help you to keep your blog clean and it will remove the frustration a reader feels when they come across a broken link. Like I said at the start of the post; one of the most useful WordPress plugins for any blogger.
Broken Link Checker plugin at WordPress.org
