How to Find and Fix Broken Links in WordPress

Regularly check for broken links in WordPress and fix them before getting penalized by Search Engines. It is necessary to have a better control over links on every post or page in your WordPress blog. Both internal and external links can be used and its recommended to add nofollow to all external links, so that link juice can be preserved.

With the increase in article count and addition of new pages, chances of having more broken links in your blog will be high. So along with regularly updating content you need to have an eye on broken links also. It is not always possible to check those many links manually, so we can use any good plugin to get our job done easily.

What are Broken Links?

Broken links can be considered as the links that are no longer live and results in 404 error page. So having too many links that doesn’t actually exist is not good when considered in terms of SEO. When someone clicks on a broken link they will be landed over a 404 page and hence its good to have a custom 404 Error Page.

How to Find Broken Links in WordPress?

WordPress got many awesome plugins and Broken Link Checker is one of those very few useful ones. By installing this plugin, the task will be automated and it will help you to find the broken links very easily.

Step 1: Download and install Broken Link Checker Plugin. (You can learn how to install a WordPress Plugin if you are a newbie).

Step 2: Go to “Broken Link Checker” plugin page and you can see the list of options available there. (Navigate through Tabbed Menu).

Step 3: Specify the time interval to check for broken links and you can also receive email notifications whenever broken links are detected.

Step 4: This plugins helps to find broken links in Posts, Pages, Comments etc. and also based on the status of post (Draft, Published, Scheduled etc.)

Step 5: Apart from HTML links, Broken Link Checker helps to check embedded videos (from Youtube, DailyMotion and Vimeo). You can also Excluded Links by specifying a set of words.

Step 6: This plugin also got integration with APIs of popular file sharing services like Rapidshare, Mediafire, FileServe etc. Select the services by using the check box.

Step 7: Finally the advanced settings page includes the connection timeout and a button that helps to manually check for broken links.

Fix Broken Links in WordPress

Select the options based on your requirement and save the settings. You have successfully configured Broken Link Checker plugin and now you need to wait for sometime till it crawls your entire website for broken links.

Once you find the broken links, you can remove them or can replace them with other links. This way users will never land on 404 error page and that will be beneficial in many ways.

Hope you like this article on how to find and fix broken links in WordPress. I highly encourage you to share your views by dropping a comment here.