How to Check WordPress Website for Broken Text and Image Links

There are more than 500 million blogs out of 1.7 billion websites in the world. Now try to imagine how many links are in the world. Exactly, there are likely just as many web links as there are stars in the universe.

With over 200+ factors to rank websites in search engines, primarily Google, a healthy backlink profile carries substantial weight in whether or not a site ranks well or ever finds the light of day on Google’s page one search results.

Many bloggers, myself included, are so focused on producing content in hopes of increasing visibility and search ranking that we often forget about the simple things in operating a blog.

Simple things like ensuring there are no to only a handful of all sorts of links that are not broken. The longer one blogs or, the older the website, the greater the percentage for broken text and image links to exist.

It becomes imperative to perform an annual (if not quarterly) review of one’s website SEO health, specifically ensuring broken text and image links are remedied.

In the old days, think the late ’90s and early 2000s, checking for broken text and image links had to be performed by hand. This was before content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and others became prominent.

Fortunately, the ability to check broken text and image links has gone from a manual process of months to a matter of automation and remedying in a few hours.

Yes, even websites and blogs with thousands of pages can be checked and remedied in a matter of minutes and hours.

In fact, if you operate a WordPress website, a couple of options are made available to check for broken text and image links.

There are many paid and non-paid options — WP Link Status Pro, QualityControl, Link Checker, Netpeak Spider, and Video Link Checker, but today I’ll focus on the one I use most often for myself and customers: Broken Link Checker.

First and foremost, this plugin is lightweight, and it’s FREE!

Broken Link Checker is one of the most popular plugins to monitor blog posts, pages, comments, and all sorts of custom field types.

I really like that Broken Link Checker offers an admin dashboard to view, edit, confirm, and recheck links. This means you don’t have to go page by page.

Another great feature is that this plugin can notify via email or dashboard and prevents search engines from following broken links too.

Check out my quick tutorial video as I share step-by-step instructions on how easy it is to install, configure, and use the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments about the tutorial video or general questions in regard to WordPress or the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin.

Thanks, and that’s all for now!