I’m sure you don’t want to have any broken links on your website. But it’s often hard to keep track of the links on your website and identify broken links.
Sure, you can do a monthly SEO audit of your website. But wouldn’t it be great if you could instantly find broken links on your website and fix them?
In this article, I’ll share some of the best broken link checker WordPress plugins and tools that you can use to quickly find and fix broken links on your website.
These broken link checker WordPress plugins and tools will make your job so easy as you’ll not have to scorch through your website to find broken links.
Let’s get started.
1. Broken Link Checker
The first plugin we have on our list is Broken Link Checker by WPMU DEV. This free broken link checker plugin monitors and tests all internal and external links on your website to find broken links.
With this plugin, you can automatically monitor and fix bad and broken links on your website. It monitors links from pages, posts, blogrolls, comments, custom fields. So, you can rest assured that no broken link is found anywhere on your website.
It detects links that don’t work, broken image links, and redirected links. Moreover, the plugin notifies you instantly on your WordPress dashboard or by email whenever a new broken link is found. This allows the user to take action on the broken link immediately.
There are some other handy features as well that make the plugin so great. One of them is that the plugin displays the broken links on your posts differently. Another handy feature of this plugin is that it prevents the search engines from following the broken links.
Here’s an overview of the features that come with this plugin:
- Internal and external link monitoring
- Checks for broken links on posts, pages, blogroll, comments, and custom fields
- Notifications via WordPress dashboard and email
- Detects missing images and redirects
- Displays broken links differently on posts
- Prevents search engines from following broken links
- Search and filter broken links
- Edit links directly from the plugin page
Overall Broken Link Checker is a great WordPress plugin if you want to automatically check for broken links without spending a penny.
The plugin is completely free without any premium version and is available on the WordPress repository.
2. Link Whisper
Link Whisper is an advanced and powerful internal linking solution for WordPress. It’s not just a broken link checker plugin but much more than that.
But for the sake of this article, I’ll only talk about its broken link checker feature.
With Link Whisper, you can instantly find all broken internal and external links on your website. The plugin automatically monitors and checks for broken links and notifies you whenever a broken link is found.
The plugin has an Error Report dashboard where you can see all bad links on your website. From this page, you can find all the broken links. The report shows the date when the broken link was discovered, whether it’s an internal or external link and the page where the broken link was found.
You can then decide the action you want to take against the broken link right from the Error Reports page.
Besides broken link checking, Link Whisper has a lot of features that will help you out with internal linking.
Here are the features of the plugin:
- Broken link checker
- Easy to use
- Automatic link suggestions
- Build internal links on old posts
- Auto internal linking based on keywords
- Internal links reporting
- Error reporting
- Editor and theme compatible
- Simple install
Here are the pricing details of the plugin:
The plugin costs $77 annually for the single site license and comes with all the features of the plugin. They also have a 3-site and 10-site plan that costs $117 annually and $167 annually.
If you’re looking for an all-round WordPress plugin that does not only help you with broken links but also automatic internal linking, then Link Whisper is a good choice for you.
3. Ahrefs
Ahrefs doesn’t even need an introduction. It’s one of the best SEO tools out there with all-round features to help you with your website’s SEO.
Ahrefs has tons of great features and their broken link checker is one of them. With their broken link checker, you can instantly find broken links on your website.
The tool lists all the outbound broken links found on your website with information about them such as the referring page, anchor and link, date discovered, status code, and more.
But that’s not it with Ahrefs. You can also find dead pages on your website that have links pointing to them. This can help you revive or redirect those pages so that you don’t lose your link equity and improve your rankings.
Lastly, you can also check all the broken internal links on your website and fix them for better crawlability and navigation.
What’s great about Ahrefs is that you can schedule a scan for finding broken links on your website. You can run this scheduled scan daily, weekly, or monthly.
Here are some great features of Ahrefs Broken Link Checker feature:
- Check broken outbound links
- Find dead pages on your website with links
- Find broken internal links
- Schedule broken link checking scan
- Find and fix broken redirects
- Export data to CSV and Excel
Let’s take a look at the pricing of Ahrefs:
The pricing of Ahrefs starts at $99 per month and goes as high as $999 per month. Each plan has different limits to their features.
If this pricing is too high for you, you can use the free version of their broken link checker where you can instantly find broken links.
4. SEMrush
SEMrush is another great tool for finding broken links on your website. Besides this, it also has an advanced set of features that can help you with your SEO.
When it comes to links, you can do so much with SEMrush. With their SEO audit tool, you can uncover so many issues on your website and fix them.
This also includes your finding broken links on your website. The SEO audit by SEMRush analyzes all the internal and external links on your website to check if there are any dead or broken links.
From there, you can then find the pages where the broken links are found and fix them.
Besides this, there are many more features in SEMRush:
- SEO audit
- Backlink analysis
- Link building tool
- Position tracking
- Traffic analytics
- Site audit
- Market explorer
- Brand monitoring
- Ad research
Here is the pricing of SEMRush:
The pricing of SEMRush starts at $99 per month for their Pro plan and goes up to $399 per month for their Business plan.
Based on your requirements, you can choose the plan that best fits your needs.
5. Google Search Console
If you already use Google Search Console which you should, then you can find broken links with just that tool itself.
Google Search Console is a very powerful tool for SEO if you know how to use it properly. With just Search Console, you can easily identify and find broken links on your website.
In the Coverage page in Search Console, you can find all broken links on your website. This page shows all the coverage issues and the 404 errors are because of the broken links.
You can then click on the error and view the list of all pages where the error was found.
This is a handy way of checking broken links if you don’t want to rely on any WordPress plugin or tool.
6. Online Broken Link Checker
As the name suggests, Online Broken Link Checker is an online tool for finding broken links on your website.
The tool scans all your pages to find broken internal and external links. You can either scan an individual page or your entire website using the tool.
Once the scan is complete, it shows all the broken and dead links on your website.
Here are the features of the online tool:
- Scans your entire website
- Checks both internal and external links
- Shows 404 errors and other HTTP response codes
- Supports sub-domains
For a free tool, Broken Link Checker comes in handy when you instantly want to find broken links on a website.
Although the complete domain scan takes some time, it is still very useful for checking broken links.
7. Check My Links
The last broken link checker tool we have on our list is a Chrome extension. Check My Links can help you find all the broken links on any page.
This extension is useful when you’re on a page with a lot of links and want to check for dead or broken links. It highlights all the links on the page with the broken ones being highlighted as red.
It also allows you to copy all the bad and broken links to your clipboard with one click.
Here are the features of this extension:
- Checks all broken links on a page
- Highlights broken links
- Copy all bad links to the clipboard with a single click
The extension is available for free on the Chrome web store.
Conclusion
So, these were the best broken link checker WordPress plugins and tools. You can choose the best tool from the list above based on your requirements.
If you want a regular scan of your website for broken links, then a WordPress plugin or tool that does automatic scans is the best fit for you.
If you have any questions regarding the plugins and tools mentioned in this list, feel free to comment below.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you make a purchase by following any of the affiliate links, I’ll get a small commission without any extra cost to you.
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