Use Link Checker Pro to crawl a WordPress site and review broken internal and external URLs, along with redirects. The external service visits pages like a regular visitor and handles most of the crawl computation, keeping the work on your website low. Link checks work with WordPress plugins out of the box.

Prepare the site

Install the Link Checker plugin in WordPress and activate it through the Plugins menu. Open Link Checker from the sidebar, then choose “Check your site” to start a crawl. The crawler respects robots.txt, including the crawl-delay directive. Check those rules if you want specific pages included.

The crawler needs to reach your site. A hosting provider may block it, and it cannot access a local development site on your network. Your site sends the developer-operated server its URL and the fact that it uses WordPress. The server performs the crawl and returns the results. Form login support lets you include protected pages, such as membership areas.

Check results and schedule follow-up

The results list broken links and redirects. Link Checker supports Polylang websites and may also work with WPML. The free version is limited to 500 URLs; the following advanced functions are available in Pro:

• Check embedded internal and external images for broken files.
• Check whether embedded YouTube videos are available.
• Schedule a site check once a day and receive a summary by email.
• Export results as a CSV file for filtering, review, or sharing.
• Save results on the Link Checker server and fetch them again without running another check, including from different customers or browsers.

Use the results list or CSV export to organize follow-up work on broken URLs, redirects, images, and videos.

Technical requirements

Link Checker works with WordPress 4.7 or newer and PHP 5.6 or newer. Before a manual or scheduled crawl, confirm that the external crawler can access your site and that its robots.txt rules allow the intended crawl.