How to Check and Fix Broken Links in a WordPress Website
Posted on February 7th, 2023
In simple words, Broken links are some links on the site that are no longer working. It can be caused by several factors, like the page that the link is pointing to no longer exists or the URL of the page has been changed. Simply put, each error containing or link without any page can be a broken link. Broken links have a negative impact on a WordPress site in different ways. First, it makes navigation difficult for visitors to the site. Second, various search engines can penalise the site. And because of that, your website may face a drop in traffic.
Nowadays, people use different web tools to find all the broken links. So, in this article, we will learn different ways to find and fix broken links on a WordPress site. We can do it manually by searching and removing the broken links. It is a very time-consuming process, but it is the most effective way to ensure that all of the links on your site are working. Here, we will learn some techniques to find Broken Links using different tools. Then, we also use a WordPress plugin to automatically find and fix broken links on WordPress. There are several additional plugins available.
Check Broken Links for Websites
Firstly in this article, we will learn the methods to check available broken links on any website. To complete this task, we will use some online web tools. These tools scan your website and collect all the information. Then it allows you to see all the website health and broken links. The tools used in this tutorial are free, so anyone can use these tools to analyse their websites. So, let’s start with the first method.
Method 1: Using Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google. It helps you monitor your website. This tool also provides tools and features to maintain and troubleshoot your website’s presence in Google Search results. You don’t need to sign up for Search Console to be included in Google Search results, but it is a good practice to submit sitemaps to Google using the search console.
Step 1: Open any Web browser and go to Google Search Engine. Then, Search for Google Search Console.
Step 2: Click on the first link available, “Google Search Console Tools”, as shown in the image below.
Step 3: Now, Click on the “Start Now” button on the main page of Google Search Console, as you can see in the image below. Then, log in using your Google Account. You can use your email address if you don’t have a Google account.
Step 4: After login, you will redirect to the main page of your Search Console. You can see your domain name here on the left side of the screen.
Step 5: Now, click on the Pages option available in the Indexing tab, as seen in the image below.
Step 6: On this page, you can see a Graph with all your “Indexed and Non-Indexed” pages. It is important to check this section as frequently as you can.
Step 7: Scroll down and come to the list of pages, as you can see in the image below.
Step 8: Click on the “Not Found(404)” pages from the list to find all the broken and non-indexed pages. If you don’t have this option on this list, you don’t have any un-indexed pages or broken links on this site. See the below image as a reference.
Step 9: On the 404:Not Found page, you can see all the details about broken links and non-indexed pages. Click on the See Details button to see the Broken Links list, as seen in the image below.
Step 10: Here, you can find all the broken links in a list, as seen in the image below.
Google Search Console comes with different features like Optimisation and Sitemaps. The tool is developed to monitor traffic and analyse users’ behaviour. It can track all types of traffic and simplify its graphs and numbers, which are easy to understand. So, let’s go to the following method.
Method 2: Using Broken Link Checker WordPress Plugin
The Broken Link Checker WordPress Plugin is an excellent tool for finding and fixing broken links on your WordPress site. This plugin will check your posts, pages, and comments for broken links and notify you if any are found. You can then quickly fix the broken links from within the plugin interface. The user interface is very user-friendly. There are more features, as you can see here.
features
- Broken Link Checker can check for all the broken and error links on your WordPress website.
- It also comes with features like checking for redirected links, not working, blocklisted and not indexed by Google.
- This plugin can send you an email notification when there are broken links on your WordPress website.
- It is designed to check all the issues and can automatically fix some broken links.
- This plugin helps you generate a sitemap of your website, which can help SEO.
Let’s learn how to use this plugin to check Broken Links on our website.
Step 1: Goto your WordPress website’s Admin Area and log in using your Username and Password.
Step 2: Once you see the WordPress Dashboard, Hover the cursor on the screen’s Plugins tab section on the right side. Then, click on the Add New tab section, as seen in the image below.
Step 3: On the Add New plugin page, Click on the search field and search for “Broken Link Checker”. Then, Find the right plugin and Click on Install Now button.
Step 4: The Install Now button will automatically be replaced by Activate button after successful installation. Click on the Activate button to Activate the plugin on this WordPress Website.
Step 5: After successful installation, Hover the cursor on the Tools section available on the right side of the screen. Then, click on the Broken Links option available at last. You can also click on the widget available on the Dashboard, as seen in the image below.
Step 6: This section will collect all the broken links, showing you a list of broken links, as you can see in the image below. Hover the cursor on the Broken Links to see the options, as seen in the image below.
Step 7: To remove the Broken Links, Click on the Trash link to delete this broken link.
Step 8: This plugin also provides a couple of features. Hover the cursor on the Settings tab section. Then click on Link Checker, as seen in the image below.
Step 9: On this page, you will see a tab section and its contents. This is the configuration page of the Broken Link Checker plugin. In the General tab, you can see a first link called Status and a Link called Show Debug Info. Click on it to see all the information about your website.
Step 10: If you want to check the Broken Links from sections like Comments, Posts, Pages and Navigation Menus. In this section, we have different checkboxes with website sections, Click on the checkbox and mark it as true to enable the settings. Then, Click on the second Tab Option called Look For Links, as seen in the image below. See the below image for more reference.
The Broken Link Checker plugin has more features, as we discussed. It is available in WordPress Plugin Repository for free. You can download and use it on different WordPress websites and make them Broken Link Free.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, We saw two methods to clear up internal and external broken links on your site. From the first method, You can find internal links that may have been crawled by Google that does not exist. You can redirect or remove links using the WordPress plugin. We hope this article helped you. If you have any questions, please comment below. We are happy to help.