Broken links are the bane of Internet users everywhere, and as your WordPress website begins to grow, you will inevitably end up with a few broken links which redirect your visitors to the dreaded 404 error page. Unfortunately, manually checking through all of your text, image and video links, particularly on larger websites, can quickly become very time consuming. However, through the use of a popular plugin such as Broken Link Checker, you can entirely automate this process. Doing so will help to ensure that your WordPress site is always kept in top working order, and we will be using this plugin for the purpose of this tutorial.
- In your administrator dashboard, navigate to Plugins > Add New. Search for the plugin called “Broken Link Checker” and click “Install Now”. Click “OK” to download and install the plugin, and be sure to activate it once this process is complete.
- A new submenu entitled “Link Checker” will appear in the Settings page, accessible from the left sidebar in your administrator dashboard. Navigate to the Link Checker submenu to open the options page for the plugin.
- By default, Broken Link Checker will scan every link on your website every 72 hours. You can change this setting by entering the preferred value into the box beside “Check each link”.
- When the plugin finds a broken link, you will be able to find the offending link by navigating to this page. However, you will likely find it far more efficient to use the email notifications supported by the program, in which case you will need to enter an email address into the box provided.
- It is also wise to change the server load limit to help ensure that your website continues to run as smoothly as possible in the event of the plugin checking for broken links when the server load is already high. To access this setting, click on the “Advanced” tab and enter a value for the server load. A good recommendation is to set the limit to 64 for most servers.
- Another useful setting on the Advanced page is the Timeout setting. If a link takes longer to load than the time in seconds specified by this setting, the plugin will consider it to be broken. The default value it 30 seconds, although you may want to lower it to ensure that your links only lead to fast and reliable pages.
- You can also use the Forced Recheck option on the Advanced page to have the plugin clear its current database and check your website from scratch. This will be useful if you have just made any major changes or added a great deal of content to your WordPress site.
