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 posted 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 more than likely 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 identifying the broken links.
Once the Broken Link Checker plugin’s installed and activated it will run a first 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 has the problem link (you can edit, delete or view the post from here)
Link Text : This shows the text which has the broken link
URL : This has the link (you can see further details of the post, unlink the broken link, exclude the url or edit the url)
Discard : Is the last 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 archived news stories, deleted flickr images, pages removed by the site owner and a couple of boken links which had never worked because of spelling mistakes on my part (naughty!).
The action I took depended upon each link/post; I deleted a couple of my posts 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 unlinked some of the others. 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 experiencing 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
