About this plugin
BlockBadURLs Broken Link Checker finds broken links, dead links, and broken images — on your own posts, pages, and external URLs — and lists them grouped by post so you can fix or remove them in one click. Broken links hurt your SEO and frustrate visitors; this plugin finds them quietly in the background with no cloud account required.
BlockBadURLS Broken Link Checker is built to stay out of the way: a scheduled, throttled scan that never runs continuously, so it never competes with your site’s own traffic for server resources, even on shared hosting.
What it does
- Checks your own links for free – a link to one of your own posts or pages is confirmed through the database, and a link to a file in your uploads folder is confirmed on disk. Neither costs an HTTP request, so checking your own site adds effectively no load.
- Checks external links politely – one link at a time, so no external site ever gets hammered and your own server stays quiet while a scan runs.
- Checks each unique link once per scan – a link repeated across thousands of posts is checked once, not once per post.
- Scheduled, throttled scanning – a full scan runs daily or weekly in small background batches, never as one continuous crawl.
- Re-checks a post the moment you edit it, so a fix shows up without waiting for the next full scan.
- Finds broken images too – a missing image is reported next to your broken links.
- Broken-link report, grouped by post, showing each link’s text so you can spot it in the post.
- Edit URL – point a broken link or image at the right address without opening the post.
- One-click Unlink – strips just the link, keeps the text – or jump straight to Edit post.
- Recheck a single link on the spot, and Dismiss one that is not really broken so it stops being reported.
- Bulk Unlink and Dismiss for cleaning up several at once.
- Restore a dismissed link, and it is checked again straight away.
- Pause, resume or start over a running scan. Pausing keeps what was found so far and “Resume scan” carries on from where it stopped.
- Settings to fit it to your site – see below.
Settings
Under Tools → BlockBadURLS Broken Link Checker → Settings:
- Scan every – day or week.
- Look for links in – which post types to scan.
- Exclusion list – links whose URL contains any of these words are not checked.
- Wait for each link – how many seconds a link may take to answer (3 to 8) before it counts as a failed check.
- Hold off when busy – skip scanning while the server load is above a number you choose, and try again a few minutes later.
- Post modified date – optionally leave a post’s modified date alone when you edit or unlink a link from BlockBadURLS Broken Link Checker.
What counts as broken
A connection failure, 404, 410, or a 5xx server error. Responses like 401, 403, and 429 are treated as alive, since many sites block automated checkers – flagging those would bury real breakage in false positives.
A 404 or 410 is reported at once. A connection failure or 5xx error can be a temporary outage, so it is only reported after failing two checks in a row.
Links the plugin is not allowed to request – because of WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL / WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS, a private network address, or an unusual port – are skipped rather than reported.
External services
This plugin connects to the external sites your own posts and pages link to, in order to check whether those links are still working. This is the plugin’s core function and cannot be turned off, since checking external links is what it does.
For each link found in your published content, during a scan, BlockBadURLS Broken Link Checker makes a HEAD request (falling back to a GET request only if HEAD fails or is rejected) to that URL, to read its HTTP response status. No data about your site or its visitors is sent – only a standard HTTP request identifying itself as BlockBadURLS Broken Link Checker, the same as a browser visiting the link would send.
Which external sites are contacted depends entirely on which external links exist in your own content – there is no fixed list.