Hello friends,

When creating posts and pages you may add various links to different sections of your website. You may also add external links to other sites as well. Creating as many internal links as possible is important for SEO. Also external links to a high-quality website that provides content similar to yours is also a great factor that may improve your rankings. But posts and pages are not the only places where you’d place a link. Widgets and the footer areas are also suitable places for them, though you should be careful with the footer links.

In other words creating links (both internal and external) is something that you’d do very often. That is why you need to monitor if they are working correctly. Therefore you need a tool that will allow you to do this on WordPress without any problems. Such a tool is Broken Link Checker.

What does Broken Link Checker do?

This is a WordPress plugin that will constantly monitor your links and if any of them are broken (i.e. not pointing to a valid location) you will be notified immediately so that you can take action and fix the issues.

How does Broken Link Checker work?

First of all you need to install and activate the plugin. You can use the WordPress plugin installer to search for it or you can visit WordPress.org and download Broken Link Checker manually. When activated you will get a new submenu in your WordPress dashboard (admin panel). It is located under Tools and is called Broken Links.

When you click there you will see a list of all non-functional links. If there are none the only thing that you will see is the “No broken links found” message under the “Broken” tab.

Here you are also able to click on “All” to see all links on your WordPress website. On this tab they are sorted in a list so that you can see the URL, its status, the link text and the source page.

There are some other tabs as well – “Warnings” (where you will get information on any potential problems with your links), “Redirects” and “Dismissed links”.

Now head to the WordPress dashboard main page. There you will see a widget that is called Broken Link Checker. It provides some information about all of your links, any broken ones and all of the URL’s that are in the work queue. This widget can be minimized so that you can save space on the WordPress dashboard.

What are the features of Broken Link Checker?

When using Broken Link Checker you will get the following features:

• monitoring on the links on each of your pages, posts, comments and so on;
• notification about any non-functional links, images that cannot be displayed and all redirects;
• possibility to get these notifications under the WordPress dashboard, the Broken Links submenu or by email;
• option to change the color of any broken link in your posts;
• option to mark broken links as no-follow so that search engine bots won’t crawl them;
• searching and filtration of links by different attributes;
• direct editing of any broken link from the plugin without manually visiting its source page/post/widget/etc.;
• various configurations;

From the tabs of the Broken Links submenu you can apply the different configurations.

May I use Broken Link Checker on my language?

Broken Link Checker is translated into many languages so there is a great chance that your own is supported. Bear in mind that some translations are still in the process of completion so that parts of the plugin interface may be untranslated with the latest release.

So now it’s up to you friends. Do you want to be sure that your links are 100% functional and entrust this task to Broken Link Checker? Share any thoughts, questions or feedback in the comment section below and don’t forget to spread the word about this post on social media as well.

See you soon, friends!