Are you tired of finding and fixing broken links on your WordPress site?
Have you ever wished there was a foolproof method to periodically monitor all internal and external links easily WITHOUT the high costs?
If you’re like me and most other smart website owners, then you have at least wished for this solution a couple of times in your WordPress journey.
Today, I’m excited to announce my new product, Broken Link Checker, which works silently in the background on your site, giving you peace of mind.
We built this tool to help you quickly check your site for broken links and easily fix them to improve search engine optimization (SEO).
What is Broken Link Checker?
Broken Link Checker is a powerful WordPress plugin that crawls your website periodically and checks every link to ensure it is not broken.
It is built as a SaaS service, so it never puts load on your WordPress hosting server or slow your website down.
The Broken Link Checker plugin was developed by the same team behind AIOSEO (All in One SEO), the best SEO plugin for WordPress.
When broken links are found, the plugin makes it easy for you to fix them right from within the plugin without even having to visit individual pages where those links were added.
Why Do You Need Broken Link Checker?
Broken links can frustrate your website visitors and cause them to leave your site. They can even hurt your website’s SEO, conversions, and sales.
On WordPress sites, broken links typically occur when moving a site to a new domain name, or when deleting a post or page without proper redirection.
Sometimes broken links can also happen due to a typo, and they can go unnoticed for months if not years. But worse, if you ever link to an external website that’s not yours, and they change the page, delete it, or shut down the site, then your site will have broken links.
This is why monitoring broken links on a regular basis is important for your WordPress website.
While there are SaaS broken link checkers in the market, most are either crazy expensive or not built specifically with WordPress websites in mind.
So I decided to work with my team to finally create a beginner-friendly broken link checker for WordPress.
With Broken Link Checker, you can…
- scan all links on your site every 3 days
- detect valid links, broken links, and redirects
- set which post types (posts, pages, or custom post types) and statuses (published, draft, and so on) to monitor
- exclude certain URLs from being checked
… and a whole lot more.
If you’re serious about your website and want to grow your online business, then you know how important it is to offer a seamless website browsing experience to your visitors.
The last thing you want your readers to see is a big 404 page not found error message serving as a dead end on your WordPress site.
How to Use Broken Link Checker in WordPress
The first thing you’ll need to do is install and activate Broken Link Checker on your site.
For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Next, you’ll need to connect the plugin to your Broken Link Checker account.
Upon connecting the plugin with your account, you can turn the toggle on to stop search engines from following broken links. You can even set it not to update the modified date for a page/post when a link is updated via the plugin.
When you click the Broken Links tab, you can see that the plugin has automatically scanned the entire site, and links are categorized into broken, redirects, and dismissed.
The Broken Link Checker plugin lets you fix broken links quickly and easily right within your plugin. To replace a broken link, simply click Edit URL.
Alternatively, if you want to remove the link, just click Unlink and the link will be removed from the page.
After updating the link, you can recheck if the link is still broken by clicking the Recheck option. If you want, you can even dismiss the message from the plugin.
Get More Details About Each Link
Broken Link Checker gives you additional details for each link, like how long the link has been broken and response header information, HTTP Status code, and more.
Control Which Types of Pages are Scanned
Another important aspect of Broken Link Checker is its advanced settings, which give you full control over which pages get scanned. Within the plugin, you can set which post types (posts, pages, or custom post types) and statuses (published, draft, and so on) to monitor.
You can also exclude certain pages from being checked.
This helps you better manage the crawl budget, so you can ensure you’re not wasting the link scan credits.
Scanning Your Site the Right Way
Broken Link Checker scans both external (links from your website to others) and internal links (links from one page on your site to another page) on your site.
Unlike other WordPress plugins, Broken Link Checker uses an external private server to scan (or, in other words, ping) for broken links on your site. That’s because repeatedly pinging external sites from your servers can make your site look suspicious to internet service providers, putting your sites at risk of being blacklisted.
This is why most WordPress hosting companies put traditional broken link checker plugins in their block list.
Since Broken Link Checker uses an external private server for pinging external links, you can rest assured that you’re in safe hands.
What’s Coming Next?
Broken Link Checker is a product by my AIOSEO team which is a leading WordPress SEO plugin with over 3 million installs.
Our goal is to continue to build best-in-class SEO tool to ensure your website is always outranking your competitors.
Broken Link Checker is just one of the new tools that we’ve launched.
We have an exciting roadmap ahead of us to make this plugin even more powerful, and I am very proud of our team.
If you have ideas on how we can make the Broken Link Checker platform or other SEO tools more helpful for you, then please send us your suggestions.
As always, I want to thank you for your continued support of WPBeginner, and we look forward to continue serving you for years to come.
Yours Truly,
Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner
P.S. Want us to acquire or invest in your WordPress business? Learn more about the WPBeginner Growth Fund.
The post Introducing Broken Link Checker – Never Have Dead Links On Your WordPress Site Again first appeared on WPBeginner.
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