There’s nothing worse than clicking on a link and landing on a 404 error page. Not only is it frustrating for your website visitors, but it also harms your website’s SEO ranking and overall credibility. If you’re running a WordPress site, the chances are that you’ve encountered this issue at some point.
Here’s where WordPress Broken Link Checker Plugins come in. These tools offer an automated solution to the persistent problem of broken links, saving you time and effort.
This blog post will delve into the best WordPress broken link checker plugins available on the market. We will explore the features, benefits, and how these WordPress broken link checker plugins can help improve your site’s performance and user experience. From plugins that offer comprehensive scanning to ones that leverage artificial intelligence for internal link building, we’ve got you covered.
Table of Contents
What Is a WordPress Broken Link Checker Plugin?
A WordPress broken link checker plugin helps detect and fix broken internal and external links across your site. These plugins scan your content, pages, menus, and media for URLs that lead to 404 errors or unavailable resources—helping you maintain SEO health and user trust.
Best WordPress Broken Link Checker Plugins for Agencies
Check out our hand-picked WordPress broken link checker plugins offering an automated solution to the persistent problem of broken links, saving you time and effort.
1. Broken Link Checker
Broken Link Checker is a highly efficient WordPress plugin designed to monitor and detect broken links on your website. Used by over 700,000 people, it offers 20x faster detection than other plugins and guarantees pinpoint accuracy. It’s a crucial tool for maintaining optimal SEO, user experience, and overall site health by identifying and resolving broken links.
Key Features
- Comprehensive Scanning: This WordPress broken link checker plugin checks every part of your site, including external and internal links within your posts, pages, comments, blogroll, and even custom fields. It also detects missing images and redirects.
- Email Reports: Notifies you of detected broken links via email, allowing for swift corrective action.
- Two Link Checking Engines: Offers a cloud-based link checker and a local link checker. The cloud-based engine is faster, checks an unlimited number of pages & URLs, and reduces the risk of being blocked. The local link checker uses your site’s resources for analysis.
- Multiple Site Management: If using the cloud-based engine, you can manage broken links for unlimited sites from one place through the WPMU DEV interface.
- Manual or Automatic Scans: You can run manual scans or set an automatic schedule as per your preference.
- Edit or Unlink Broken Links: This WordPress broken link checker plugin allows you to edit or unlink detected broken links directly from your dashboard.
- Advanced Search Filtering: This helps you find specific URLs or filter by status or error type faster and easier.
Pricing
The Broken Link Checker plugin is free to use. It’s developed by WPMU DEV, a renowned all-in-one WordPress platform, and is part of their suite of powerful web development tools. Keep your website running smoothly and efficiently with Broken Link Checker, the most trusted tool for staying on top of your site’s link health.
Not sure which broken link plugin performs best? Use InstaWP to run side-by-side tests in real WordPress sandboxes.
2. Broken Link Checker by AIOSEO
Keep your WordPress site healthy and SEO-friendly with the Broken Link Checker by AIOSEO! This must-have tool efficiently scans and monitors both internal and external links on your website, helping you identify and fix broken links quickly. Its intuitive SaaS-based system ensures optimal WordPress performance without impacting your server while providing detailed reports and actionable recommendations.
Key Features
- Monitors internal and external links: Ensure that all links, whether internal or external, are functioning properly to maintain a seamless user experience.
- Provides granular control over what is monitored: Customize which post types (pages, posts, or custom types) and statuses (published, draft, pending) to monitor for broken links.
- Detailed reporting with error statuses (200, 301/302, 404): Receive clear, actionable insights with specific error codes to fix broken, redirected, or working links.
- Free plan for up to 200 link scans per month: Start with a free plan that covers up to 200 internal links, with credits resetting every month.
Pricing
- 1 Site License: $47 (originally $97)
- 3 Site License: $117 (originally $167)
- 10 Site License: $167 (originally $217)
3. Link Whisper Free
Link Whisper is a WordPress broken link checker plugin designed to simplify the process of building internal links. By leveraging artificial intelligence, Link Whisper provides contextual internal link suggestions that improve your website’s content navigation and Google ranking.
Key Features
- Small Suggestions: This WordPress broken link checker plugin uses AI to suggest relevant internal links, enhancing your site’s link structure and improving its SEO ranking.
- Automatic Link Suggestions: Link Whisper provides link suggestions in real-time as you write your content in the WordPress editor.
- Internal Links Reporting: Allows you to quickly identify content with few or no internal links and provides reports on outbound internal and external links for each article.
- Customize Internal Link Suggestions and Settings: You can fine-tune link suggestions and ignore certain words or phrases for optimal linking opportunities. You can also set all internal links to open in a new tab.
Pricing
This WordPress broken link checker plugin operates on a freemium model – it offers a free version with basic features and a premium version with advanced features.
- 1 Site License – $97- $47
- 3 Site License – $167-$117
- 10 Site License – $217-$167
Managing multiple client sites? Use InstaWP’s site management feature to do bulk install and update of Link Whisper and monitor broken links across all projects from a single dashboard.
4. BetterLinks
Boost your brand’s marketing efforts with BetterLinks! This advanced WordPress broken link checker plugin allows you to easily create, shorten, manage, and track your URLs, all while offering advanced features like dynamic redirects, UTM builder, and real-time analytics.
Whether you’re looking to enhance your affiliate marketing strategy or manage your links more efficiently, BetterLinks is designed to optimize your campaigns and improve link performance with ease.
Key Features
- Quick and easy link shortening: Turn long URLs into attractive, easy-to-share shortened links within minutes.
- Real-time analytics: Track the performance of your links, monitor click-through rates, and generate detailed campaign reports to boost marketing efforts.
- Link redirects (301, 302, 307): Redirect links to different destinations with multiple redirect types.
- Monitor marketing campaigns: Use the UTM builder to track and analyze marketing campaigns effectively.
- Affiliate marketing enhancement: Streamline your affiliate marketing strategies with performance tracking and analysis.
- Bot click blocker: Prevent bot traffic and invalid clicks with an integrated Bot Blocker.
- Broken link checker: Ensure all your links are working properly with a built-in broken link checker.
- Seamless integration with Gutenberg & Elementor: Easily manage links directly within the Gutenberg and Elementor editors for quick access and control.
- Advanced user management: Manage user roles and permissions, allowing for flexible link management across your team.
Pricing
- Basic Plan: Starts at $47
- Pro Plan: Starts at $97
5. Online Link Checker
Broken links can hurt your website’s performance, SEO ranking, and user experience. With Online Link Checker, you can quickly identify and fix both internal and external broken links, ensuring your website runs smoothly and maintains a professional image. This easy-to-use tool is designed to help webmasters and SEO specialists keep their websites free of dead links that could damage their reputation and rankings.
Key Features
- Checks for Dead Links: Detects broken internal and external URLs across your site.
- Unlimited Page Scanning: The free version scans up to 3000 pages with no limit on the number of hyperlinks.
- Error Reporting: Shows HTTP error codes like 404 for broken URLs.
- Location Detection: Highlights broken link locations directly in your HTML code.
- Cross-Platform Compatibility: Works on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android, and iOS.
.Pricing
It is a free online broken link checker plugin.
6. Broken Link Checker By Aherf
Broken links can severely affect your website’s SEO and user experience. The Broken Link Checker powered by Ahrefs helps you quickly identify both inbound and outbound dead links. With the power of the industry’s largest live backlinks database, this tool discovers broken links instantly, ensuring your site remains fully functional and optimized. Regular checks prevent the negative impact of dead links and improve your site’s crawlability and navigation.
Fixing hundreds of links? Make bulk changes on an InstaWP staging site first to avoid live site errors or unexpected layout shifts.
Key Features
- Comprehensive Link Scanning: Identifies broken outbound, inbound, and internal links across your site.
- Real-time Data: Powered by Ahrefs’ live backlinks database, updated every 15 minutes.
- Easy-to-Use Interface: Simple to enter your domain and quickly view broken links.
- Prioritize Fixes: Sort and filter broken links to tackle the most critical issues first.
- Automatic Crawls: Schedule daily, weekly, or monthly crawls to detect new broken links regularly.
- Link Equity Recovery: Redirect or reinstate dead pages to reclaim “link equity” and improve rankings.
- Improved Navigation: Eliminate or fix broken internal links to enhance crawlability and user experience.
Pricing
Ahrefs offers a Broken Link Checker as part of their subscription plans, providing full access to the tool and other SEO features. While specific pricing may vary, their plans start at:
- Lite Plan: $99/month
- Standard Plan: $199/month
- Advanced Plan: $399/month
Ahrefs’ Broken Link Checker is an essential tool for ensuring a clean, functional website that enhances SEO and user satisfaction.
7. Dead Link Checker
Broken links can hurt your website’s SEO and user experience. Dead Link Checker helps you easily identify and correct broken links, ensuring your site remains fully optimized. Whether you need to check a single page or multiple websites at once, this tool provides a fast and accessible way to keep your site free of dead links. Regular checks prevent errors like 404 pages from damaging your rankings and user experience.
Key Features
- Single and Multiple Site Checking: Check individual webpages or entire websites for broken links with ease.
- Automatic Reports: With Multi Check and Auto Check, receive automated reports directly to your inbox for ongoing link monitoring.
- Improved SEO: Prevent dead links from stopping search engine crawlers and negatively impacting your rankings.
- User Experience Enhancement: Fix broken links to provide a seamless browsing experience for visitors.
- No Downloads Needed: Simple, online tool with no software installation required.
- Free and Paid Plans: Access manual checks for free or upgrade for automated services with affordable subscription options.
- Regular Monitoring: Auto Check offers scheduled scans to keep your site up-to-date and error-free.
Pricing
- Free Manual Checking: Available for single-site and multi-site checks.
- Basic Plan: $12/year (auto-checks for a single site)
- Pro Plan: $35/year (auto-checks for up to 5 sites)
- Premium Plan: $60/year (auto-checks for unlimited sites)
Dead Link Checker makes it easy and affordable to keep your site in top shape with no large SEO packages required.
8. Broken Link Checker for YouTube
The Broken Link Checker for YouTube is a WordPress broken link checker plugin designed to automatically validate YouTube embeds in your published posts. This is done by extracting video IDs from each post and querying the YouTube API to ensure those IDs are still valid.
Key Features
- Automatically validates YouTube video embeds in your posts
- Uses the official YouTube API to check the validity of video IDs
- Essential for video sites to avoid presenting visitors with broken content
- Monitors for videos that are frequently uploaded and removed
Pricing
This is a free broken link checker plugin for WordPress
9. Link Checker Professional
Ensure your website is always up and running smoothly with Link Checker Professional. This WordPress plugin uses an external server to crawl your website, identifying broken links, images, and videos.
Unlike traditional search engine tools, this WordPress broken link checker plugin checks all types of links, both internal and external, giving you a comprehensive view of your website’s health. With an easy setup and low server impact, it’s an essential tool for any WordPress website owner looking to maintain a seamless user experience.
Key Features
- Comprehensive link checking: Identifies broken links, images, and YouTube videos on your site.
- Works with all plugins: Compatible with every WordPress plugin out of the box.
- Low server impact: The external server does the heavy lifting, ensuring minimal load on your website.
- Polylang and WPML support: Perfect for multilingual websites.
- Scheduler feature: Automatically checks your website once a day and sends a summary report via email.
- CSV export: Allows you to export broken link data for easy analysis and record-keeping.
- Login form support: Checks protected areas of your website, such as membership or login-only pages.
- External server usage: Ensures your website’s resources aren’t strained during the link checking process.
Pricing
- Paid Plugin (requires token purchase)
- Service available for users who have already purchased tokens (expires mid-January 2024)
10. Finder
Finder is a free WordPress broken link checker plugin designed to identify and verify all links on your website, ensuring they work as intended. This includes finding broken image links. Dead or dysfunctional links can harm your SEO ranking, as search engines mark them as harmful. This WordPress broken link checker plugin scans your website for such links, whether they’re in comments, posts, or anywhere else on your site.
Key Features
- Manual Scan: This feature allows you to manually scan for dead links on your published WordPress pages.
- Live Report: You can view the scan report as it progresses.
- Edit Page: Provides a direct link to edit the parent page of a broken link.
- Downloadable Report: You can download the scanned report in CSV format for further analysis.
Pricing
Finder is a completely free plugin, with a premium tier costing $29/year.
11. Infinite WP Broken Link Checker
Infinite WP Broken Link Checker is a comprehensive plugin designed for WordPress websites to effectively manage and fix broken links. This tool is particularly useful for maintaining the integrity of your website, ensuring a smooth user experience, and optimizing search engines.
Key Features
- Detection of Broken and Redirected Links: This WordPress broken link checker plugin efficiently scans your website to identify all broken links, including both internal and external links, as well as redirected ones.
- Bulk Actions: Offers the functionality to take bulk actions on broken links. This feature saves time by allowing you to address multiple issues simultaneously.
- Direct Link Editing: Allows you to edit broken links directly from the plugin’s interface, eliminating the need to manually search through content.
- Quick Setup and Download: This WordPress broken link checker plugin is designed for easy setup, ensuring a user-friendly experience right from installation.
- Automatic Broken Link Fixing: This provides options to automatically fix broken links, which is essential for maintaining a healthy website without constant manual intervention.
- Performance Optimization: Designed to minimize the impact on website performance, ensuring that the scanning process does not slow down your site.
Pricing
Infinite WP Broken Link Checker is an effective solution for website owners looking to maintain the integrity of their links with minimal hassle. It’s available at $127/year.
Pro Tips for Maintaining a Healthy WordPress Link Profile
Don’t just rely on one-time scans. Keep your link health strong by:
- Scheduling automated scans weekly or monthly
- Monitoring affiliate links and product pages
- Keeping plugins/themes updated to avoid permalink changes
- Regularly reviewing redirects and media library links
Create a reusable InstaWP template with your broken link checker pre-installed for fast deployment across all your client or internal projects.
Final Word
In conclusion, maintaining the health and efficacy of your website’s link structure is crucial for optimal SEO ranking and user experience. Whether it’s scanning your site for broken links, offering AI-powered internal link suggestions, validating YouTube video embeds, or identifying and verifying all site links, these plugins are indispensable tools for any website owner.
Don’t hesitate to try out these plugins today, delve into more detailed reviews, and engage with us to share your experience.
FAQs
What is a WordPress Broken Link Checker Plugin?
A WordPress Broken Link Checker plugin is a tool that automatically scans your website for broken or dead links, both internal and external. It identifies links that lead to error pages (such as 404 errors) and provides recommendations for fixing them, helping to maintain your website’s SEO health and user experience.
Why are broken links bad for my WordPress site?
Broken links negatively affect your site’s SEO by preventing search engine crawlers from indexing your pages properly. They also lead to a poor user experience, as visitors will encounter error pages, which can reduce trust in your site and increase bounce rates.
How do I know if my WordPress site has broken links?
You can use a broken link checker plugin to automatically scan your WordPress site for dead links. These plugins will detect both internal (within your site) and external (outbound links) broken links, showing you exactly where the issues are.
Can broken links hurt my website’s SEO?
Yes, broken links can hurt your website’s SEO. When search engines like Google crawl your website and encounter dead links, they may stop indexing your site properly or decrease its rankings. Keeping your links intact is crucial for maintaining good SEO health.
How often should I check for broken links on my WordPress site?
It’s recommended to check for broken links regularly—at least once a month. You can set up automated checks with some broken link checker plugins that will notify you when new broken links are found, so you can fix them promptly.
Do WordPress Broken Link Checker Plugins slow down my site?
Most modern WordPress Broken Link Checker plugins are designed to be efficient and won’t slow down your website’s performance. Some plugins run checks in the background or at scheduled intervals to minimize any impact on load times.
Can I fix broken links manually, or is a plugin necessary?
While it’s possible to manually search for and fix broken links by reviewing your site’s content, using a plugin is much more efficient. A plugin automates the process and provides detailed reports, saving time and ensuring that no broken links are overlooked.
Are broken link checker plugins free?
Many WordPress Broken Link Checker plugins offer both free and premium versions. Free versions typically allow you to check for broken links on a single website, while premium versions often include advanced features like automatic link checking, detailed reporting, and more frequent scans.
How can I fix broken links on my WordPress site?
Once a broken link is identified, you can fix it by:
Updating the link to the correct URL.
Removing or replacing the link with a working one.
Redirecting the broken link to a relevant page using a 301 redirect.
Will using a broken link checker affect my website’s ranking?
No, using a broken link checker does not affect your website’s ranking. In fact, it can help improve your SEO by identifying and fixing broken links that might be harming your site’s performance in search engines.
Can a Broken Link Checker Plugin help with SEO?
Yes, a broken link checker plugin can indirectly boost your SEO by fixing broken links that could hurt your rankings. By keeping your website free of dead links, you ensure a smoother user experience and better site crawlability, which are factors that search engines consider for ranking.
