How To Fix Broken Links?

Hi Kenner82

Thank you for your interest in the plugin.

I’m sorry, but there is no function to quickly edit the broken or redirected links currently.

Implementing such a function is very challenging because of how the Link Checker works.

The Broken Link Checker works by directly loading and processing the posts and other content from the database. Thus the plugin exactly know where the broken links were found internally. Therefore it could provide easy editing. But one disadvantage is that it can only check links that occur in known structures and for example if a plugin uses its own database tables to store content, the Broken Link Checker cannot check these links.

My Link Checker crawls the whole website and can thus check all links, but has no knowledge of the internal structure (database tables) of the site. Therefore it is difficult to provide editing functionality.

The plugin could search the broken or redirected links it found in the database to locate for example the post, but full text searches in the database are not cheap and thus very bad performance wise.

There are two ways I could tackle this problem:

1. One way would be to lookup the post by the permalink of the page where a broken or redirected link was found. However, this would only work for some pages and for example would not work if the broken link was found in the menu or footer of the page.

2. The other approach I have in mind is to provide an overlay over your website that highlights the broken or redirected links. Thus you would have a link to your own site for each page of your site in the Link Checker result. And if you click on the link, a modal opens that shows your page with the broken or redirected links highlighted.

Instead of the overlay, I may can even create screenshots with the highlighted links and show them directly in the result. This would be much more complicated, but maybe worth to consider.

This approach would help you locate the links, but also cannot provide easy editing like the Broken Link Checker does.

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Does one of the proposed approaches sound helpful to you?

Best regards
Marco

I was also very excited to find this plugin but I know we have thousands of broken links and Broken Link Checker does have the option to unlink/remove the links opposed to just reporting it and we having to manually remove/edit the links. It would be perfect if you added the function where broken links can not only be reported but fixed (removed) and also bulk option with a X amount per minute option so server won’t get overloaded.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by tripledm.

Hi @tripledm

Thank you very much for your feedback. I will have a closer look what I can do in this direction in the next days.

Best regards
Marco

Hi Marco,
Did you make any progress on possible solution?
I am definitely buying your product for a client but have the huge task of how to clean up the broken links as they have a lot of posts and I have no doubt due to age of a lot of them it will be 10s of thousands of pages with broken links.

Thank you

Hi @tripledm

Sorry I did not reply earlier, I was very busy the last days.

I have thought about it and an auto remove function will not come anytime soon.

The problem with it is that it is very time consuming to implement and I would have to invest approximately at least 50 to 100 hours to get it right. The main reason for this is that many sites have invalid or badly formatted HTML code and manipulating such code is very hard and it’s also hard to detect where a broken link comes from in the database.

It’s also high risk because if I just introduce a small bug, it could break sites irrecoverably if no backup is available. And if the plugin just gets one review that states that it broke a site, it’s probably dead.

50 to 100 hours is much for me because the Link Checker is still a side project that barely makes any money despite the large user base. And I have lots of items on my ToDo list that bring benefits to a larger group of users.

I also belief that just removing broken links is not a good solution in the most cases. In many situations it is necessary to rewrite or restructure the content. If the links are just removed the content would loose quality…

However, a function that allows easier editing of the broken links will definitely come, I can just not say when exactly.

Sorry for that.

Best regards
Marco

Hi Marco,

Thank you for the response and I 1000% get what you are saying.

I do hope this comes as a feature even if it’s a rate limited version so not auto remove it as it scans but review, select a lot and run on only those as we have thousands lol.

Thank you for awesome plugin I did buy the pro and loving it!

Hi @tripledm

Thank you for your purchase. I’m glad that you like the plugin.

I just did a short experiment and I could implement a rudimentary “quick edit” function in a few hours. Thus that there is a button for each result item that opens the default WordPress editor for the post on this page in a modal. Would this function already help you?

One limitation of this approach would be that it only works for posts and not for content created with other plugins if they don’t use posts.

Best regards
Marco

Hi Marco,

That would be awesome! Every bit helps.

One useful plugin I tried has a “unlink” option then you can select a lot at a time in list view and unlink them that way, maybe not for now but a future version but direct edit as you say from the list is awesome thank you!

Hi @tripledm

I have just published version 1.16.0 of the Link Checker. The new version has an ‘edit’ button next to each URL that could be assigned to a post. With a click on the button, the default editor (with the post loaded) is opened in a new browser tab.

May you have a look at this and let me know if it helps?

Best regards and have a nice weekend,
Marco

Hell @mbsec

I was away and completely missed the update thank you for this it’s awesome!!!

This definitely helps big time!