Sometimes you might have encountered an error 404 not found on websites. These broken links are so annoying and certainly give a bad user experience. From the website owner’s point of view, they are not only driving out the visitors, but they are also impacting your website ranking negatively in search engines. 

Before going in-depth to the topic, let’s learn more about broken links. 

What is a broken link?

A broken link or dead link is a hyperlink on a website that no longer works. There are several reasons why this happened:

• Incorrect URLs entered for the link by the website owner.
• Removed web page links (causing what is known as a 404 error).
• Inexistent or permanently moved website’s destination 
• Firewall or software blocking access to the destination website
• Off-limits destination link 

Broken links are problematic for website visitors as these make them unable to access the desired information on the website. In consequence, these users may decide to leave and move to other websites elsewhere. 

Besides, a site that hasn’t been updated or checked for a long time may suffer from link rot, which describes a site with many broken links. 

To avoid these accidents, you should periodically check for broken links on your entire website. But it might take a lot of time to check it manually. Instead, you can save up your time by using an automatic broken link checker tool. 

In this article, we will review the Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress. 

Getting Started

Broken Link Checker is a WordPress plugin by WPMU DEV. This plugin checks and tests both internal and external links on your website and notify you if there are broken links found. Using this you can easily find all the broken links, fix them, then improve your website’s SEO and user experience. 

This plugin is available for free. So, you can get it without paying by directly installing the plugin from your WordPress. There are more than 700k users using the Broken Link Checker plugin for their WordPress sites. 

What are the main features of Broken Link Checker?

• Monitors all your website’s link

All links including external links and internal links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and other contents will be monitored by this plugin. There is an additional option for you to custom field the monitoring.

• Detects unworking links 

Detections include links that don’t work, missing images, and redirects.

• Broken Link Notification

When broken links are found, you will get notifications containing a list of new broken links. The notification is either via your WordPress Dashboard or by email.

• Prevents search engines from following broken links

This is an optional function available in this plugin. Enabling this will prevent your web ranking from dropping in search engines.

• Makes broken links display differently in post

If the plugin detects a broken link, there is an option for you to hide or display the link differently.

• Edit Broken Links

Instead of editing links manually from that particular edit post page, you can just edit it directly from this plugin’s page.

• Links Search & Filter

You can search and filter links based on the URL, anchor text, and etc.

• Highly configurable

There are several additional options and settings that you can configure according to your needs.

Why should I use Broken Link Checker?

Free

Using Broken Link Checker, you can get a tool to check and fix your website’s broken links for free. 

Basic features to improve SEO

Even if Broken Link Checker is available for free, it is not lacking. You can still get features for checking and fixing broken links along with other options that will help improve your website SEO ranking. 

Works automatically and quickly

Rather than checking and fixing the links one by one, you can use the Broken Link Checker plugin instead. 

Just run the broken link scanning then this plugin will automatically list all of the broken links found on your website. Sit back and wait for the process as it runs automatically and quickly. 

Easy to use

As it is available as a plugin in WordPress, you can access all the features directly from your dashboard. When you go to the setting you can enable or disable the features and options there, making it easy for you to use. 

Where can I get Broken Link Checker?

You can get this plugin from the WordPress dashboard.

1. Go to Plugins in your WordPress dashboard
2. Click on Add new
3. Search Broken Link Checker by WPMU DEV then install it
4. After that click on Activate
5. You can access the plugin through Tools > Broken Links 

If you want to download the latest version of the plugin, you can download it from here.

How to use Broken Link Checker?

Pros 

1. Free
2. Time-saving
3. Very helpful
4. Easy to use 

Cons 

1. Occasionally false reports of broken links
2. Do not detect all links
3. Redirects cannot be set automatically 

Conclusion

Broken Link Checker is a WordPress plugin with the purpose of searching and fixing broken links in websites automatically. It is free and works wonderfully. Even though there are several reviews saying that it often reports false links or does not detect all links, it is still a great tool you can use.

Save up your time from checking links manually one by one and just use this one plugin. 

Reference 

• Computer Hope – Broken Links
• Broken Link Checker Plugin
• GitHub – Broken Link Checker
• Themeisle Review
• Formget Review