Find Broken Links in WordPress Websites Easily

How to Find Broken Links in WordPress

Do you want to find broken links on your site easily? This article will guide you on how to find them.

Running a website smoothly and successfully requires a lot of hard work. You need to keep an eye on everything that’s happening on it and make sure everything is running efficiently. You need to perform some maintenance tasks as well, one of which is ensuring all the links on your content work properly. Checking all the links on your website manually could take you forever. That’s why WordPress makes it easier for you by providing essential WordPress plugins. We will guide you on how one can find broken links on WordPress websites by simply using a plugin.

Broken links are not healthy for both SEO and user experience in the digital arena. Finding and fixing them will help you make your website stay relevant and reliable. But how does it actually happen? How does a broken link take place? A broken link occurs when the page/post you hyperlinked is not available anymore—either it’s been removed, deleted, or its URL was changed. When users click on a broken link, a 404 error message will be displayed, which can be quite frustrating.

Let’s get started with our article on how one can find broken links on WordPress sites.

Find Broken Links on WordPress sites

First of all, install and activate a simple plugin named Broken Link Checker from the WordPress Plugin Directory. There are several other link checker plugins as well, however, Broken Link Checker is the most popular and well-rated plugin. The plugin boasts more than 700K Active Installs. It is completely free and comes with a wide range of customization options.

Broken Link Checker WP Plugin

Upon activation, head towards Settings > Link Checker to further check the features it provides. It has five tabs – General, Look for Links In, Which Links to Check, Protocols & APIs, and Advanced. You can go through the tabs one by one and customize it the way you want.

Broken Link Checker Options

Just after activating the plugin, it will start scanning your website and notify you if there are any broken links. You will see the results next to the Status.

Broken Links result

Click on the link and it will lead you to a page with all the broken links on your site. While performing the task in localhost, I found one broken link with status 404 Not Found. You can either edit URL, unlink, dismiss, recheck, or mark links as not broken if you think you got a false positive result. You can also add a new link and fix the problem as well.

And that’s a wrap. This is how you can find broken links in WordPress and fix them promptly. Boost your website’s efficiency and improve user experience with the Broken Link Checker plugin.

Do you have anything to ask, add, or share? Feel free to drop them in the comments section below.

 

 

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