Find out about broken links on your site automatically
If your site is built on the WordPress platform, there’s a plugin (of course there is) that can save you some headaches, especially if you already have lots of outgoing links and/or are actively adding new links in blog posts or pages.
Broken Link Checker is a plugin I install on all client sites. Install and activate it and it will check all the links on your site periodically. It’ll even send you an email when it finds a broken link!
This came in handy recently on a client’s site. He was linking to a number of other web pages run by one department in the Wyoming government; they changed their website structure and naming conventions so about a dozen links suddenly were broken. He wouldn’t have known about it right away except for the Broken Link Checker plugin.
Here’s how to configure it to send you email notifications:
- Login to WordPress.
- Go to Tools > Broken Link Checker
- Click on Go to Settings at top right
- Here you can set it to run every n hours and also make it send you emails. There are other settings available too, such as stopping search engines from following broken links.
Broken Link Checker is highly recommended for any WordPress site. If you don’t have it already, download it the next time you check in on your site.