Find Broken Links Across Your WordPress Content
- Websites naturally change over time.
- Pages are deleted, products disappear, domains expire, external resources move, and URLs that worked when an article was originally published may eventually lead nowhere.
- Finding these links manually becomes increasingly difficult as a WordPress website grows.
- Broken Link Checker scans your published content and collects the URLs it finds before checking whether those destinations are still reachable.
- Instead of opening hundreds of posts individually and clicking every link, you can run a centralized scan and focus your attention on URLs that appear to have a problem.
- This is particularly useful for established websites with years of blog posts, documentation, landing pages, resources, or other content containing links that may no longer be current.
Check Internal and External Links
- A broken internal link and a broken external link create similar problems for visitors, but they often need to be investigated differently.
- Internal links point somewhere on your own WordPress website. A page may have been deleted, moved, changed to draft, or replaced without the original content being updated.
- External links are less predictable. A third-party website may reorganize its content, remove a resource, change domains, experience downtime, or begin redirecting an old URL somewhere else.
- Broken Link Checker handles both.
- For internal URLs, WP PowerSuite first checks whether WordPress can resolve the destination to content on your website. Unpublished destinations can be identified as broken rather than being treated as normal public pages.
- When necessary, HTTP checks are then used to determine how the destination responds.
- External URLs are checked remotely using secure HTTP requests with fallback behavior for servers that do not respond properly to initial HEAD requests.
Go Beyond Standard Text Links
- Links inside WordPress content are not always simple < a href="" > elements.
- Images can point to missing resources through src attributes. Responsive images can contain several URLs inside srcset. Gutenberg blocks may store destinations within their structured block data.
- Page builders can introduce another layer of stored content.
- Broken Link Checker therefore looks beyond ordinary hyperlinks. It can inspect relevant URLs found in WordPress post content, Gutenberg data, images, responsive image sources, and Elementor content.
- This broader scanning approach helps uncover broken resources that a basic hyperlink-only checker could overlook.
- At the same time, non-web destinations such as email addresses, telephone links, JavaScript actions, page anchors, data URLs, and template placeholders are ignored rather than being unnecessarily tested.
Understand Broken, Redirected, and Inconclusive Links
- Not every unusual HTTP response means the same thing.
- WP PowerSuite separates scan results into meaningful groups rather than treating every non-200 response as a broken link.
- Broken results include links with strong indications that the destination is unavailable, such as HTTP errors, DNS failures, connection timeouts, unpublished internal content, and detected soft 404 pages.
- Redirects identify URLs that respond by sending the visitor somewhere else. These links may still work, but updating the original content to point directly to the final destination can sometimes provide a cleaner linking structure.
- Inconclusive results cover situations such as 403 or 429 responses. These websites may be working normally for visitors but refusing or rate-limiting automated requests.
- This distinction reduces false assumptions and gives you better information when deciding which links actually require attention.
Detect Soft 404 Pages
- Some websites do not return a proper HTTP 404 response when a page is missing.
- Instead, the server may respond with a successful 200 OK status while the page itself displays a message such as "Page not found."
- A checker looking only at HTTP status codes could incorrectly consider that URL healthy.
- Broken Link Checker performs additional checks on response content to help identify these soft 404s, giving you a better chance of finding links that technically respond but no longer lead to useful content.
