Monitoring your website for broken links is a tedious task but that doesn’t mean you should ignore all the linked content. You should never ignore broken links as they can cause trouble for your users and if that’s an affiliate link, well you are losing out on your money, which is not a good sign.
To help you manage with all these links, you can make use of the WP Link Status plugin. It checks your site for any broken links and redirections. In case one of your link throws back a 404 Not Found Error, it will automatically shoot you a notification to the registered email address so that you can fix it as soon as possible.
These broken links, if not managed and fixed sooner can cause serious issues in the sight of Google. Google hates 404 errors on your blog as it hurts the user experience of your site.
If you are using affiliate links on your blog, I highly recommend you to cloak them using a redirection plugin. You might be interested in reading my post on how to cloak affiliate links in WordPress.
Using the WP Link Status plugin, you can also easily edit the URLÂ or the link anchor text, unlink content and convert links to nofollow without having to edit the entire post. The minimum required version for the plugin to work properly is WordPress 3.4.
Also Read: What’s new in WordPress 4.7 ‘Vaughan’
WP Link Status can also be used for finding broken (non-existent) images you had earlier inserted in your posts or pages. It also provides us with a bulk edit option thereby saving our time to a huge extent.
And the best part is, if you are planning to uninstall the plugin at any time you’re using it, you can choose the option to remove all plugin data (options, user metadata and MySQL tables) on uninstall. You can get the WP Link Status plugin from here.
Thus I hope this post helped you in learning how to find and fix broken links and manage redirections in your WordPress powered website. 🙂
This is a great post. Indeed broken links are a headache. I have had very bitter experiences at many sites. You have done a superb job, Anto. very useful post.
Hey Harish, thanks for stopping by and taking time to leave a comment. Yes, broken links are such a headache, both for the site owners and the visitors too. Glad that you found this post useful. You might also be interested in reading my other posts related to WordPress.
Good post. There are other tools to check broken links. Yoast plugin have the option with many more tools.
Hello Namadi, thanks for mentioning Yoast over here. Its Search Console feature is pretty handy as it collects the data directly from your Google Search console. But unfortunately, to fix the broken links automatically it requires us to purchase the premium version. Anyway, it’s well worth it.