Broken links on a website can lead to a poor user experience and lower search engine rankings. Identifying and fixing them is essential to ensure a seamless browsing experience for your visitors. This guide will walk you through three different methods to check for broken links on a WordPress site.
Manual Check
Inspect Pages One by One Checking pages manually is an approach that can be both time-consuming and tedious, particularly for larger websites. To perform this method, you need to visit each page on your website and click on all the internal and external links to verify that they function correctly. As you encounter broken links, note them and fix them accordingly.
Use W3C Link Checker
The W3C Link Checker tool is a reliable resource for identifying broken links on your WordPress site. To use this tool, visit https://validator.w3.org/checklink and enter your website’s URL before clicking “Check” to initiate the analysis. The tool will then scan your site and display a list of any broken links it detects. You can fix these broken links by updating or removing them on your website.
Use Broken Link Checker Plugin
The Broken Link Checker plugin is a convenient way to automate identifying and fixing broken links. To get started, download and install the plugin from https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/. Once installed, navigate to the plugin’s Settings page within your WordPress dashboard. From here, you can customize settings based on your preferences, such as the frequency of checks and whether to receive email notifications. The plugin will automatically scan your site and report broken links in its dashboard, allowing you to directly edit, unlink, or update the problematic links.
Conclusion
Regularly checking for broken links is essential to maintaining a user-friendly and search-engine-optimized WordPress site. Choose the method that best suits your needs, and ensure your visitors have a seamless browsing experience on your website.
