Topher’s Testing: Broken Link Checker for WordPress
This is the fourth video in a series we’re calling “Topher’s Testing”.
Topher is our WordPress teacher, and he’s sitting down to test some really useful new WordPress plugins.
This week Topher introduces us to the Broken Link Checker plugin, which will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found.
https://vimeo.com/289855670
Sigh, and I have been looking for something that would do this on an automated basis, and after doing a google search (for the last month only) I found this review, and sadly enough, thanks to you I am not going to try this on my blog. Guess I gotta check manually. 🙁 Great review, but sad results.
Thanks Johnny. Sorry we didn’t have better news, but at least that’s helpful in it’s own way.
I actually ended up installing it anyways, after doing a backup (zip and database) and it has removed a good 400-500 broken links. I then use the “move source to trash” option to completely remove the posts because I use “posts” differently than most, as for some posts are only useful information for 5-6 days and then become 404s. In another day or two it will start its cycle again and I will see what is going on load wise, but I monitored the system load for the 3 hours it was running and it didn’t get above 0.25 for doing everything it was doing. I don’t mind that, considering I have 4 cores too. So far so good, but it if changes, I will definitely update this thread.
Now I am trying to find a 404 plugin that will show related posts and “possibily” redirect for the closest match, but the same thing is happening with those plugins as they did with this plugin, not very positive reviews, and support threads look horrendous. If you know any good 404 Redirect ones that I could use REGEx for the incoming (after it proves to be a 404) and then I could redirect to a category based on if it passes regex check, that would be great. But for BLC. I am currently using it as and I would mark it as acceptable. I have not disabled it and it load is currently 0.00 on htop.
Thanks for review!
Johnny
Also, it just found 3 Broken links that were indeed still working. I had to go to the menu and choose “Recheck” or “mark as not broken” 10 times before it cleared it out of my queue. I detect some loose coding when it comes to the gui, hopefully that isn’t the same when it comes to production.
Thanks Johnny. That’s hugely valuable feedback.