How To Fix Broken Link In Wordpress - Best Tips

Welcome to AiTechtonic, let’s know How To Fix Broken Link In WordPress – Best Tips – Do you want to fix broken links in your WordPress site? Broken links greatly affect the user experience of the visitor. It even affects your website SEO. Broken links are links on your site that do not exist and when visitors click on them, they are faced with a 404 page not found error.

However, there are many tools and websites that help you get rid of broken links. But if you are a WordPress user, then with the help of Broken Link Checker plugin, you can easily fix broken links on your site.

This plugin checks for broken links and redirected links on your WordPress website/blog and provides many options to fix them.

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What are Broken Links?

When a user clicks on your post or link and when he has to face the error 404 page not found, then it is called Broken Links.

Broken links are also called dead links, it not only affects the user experience but also has a negative effect on your website ranking.

How to Check Broken Links in WordPress Blog

Firstly, install and activate Broken Link Checker plugin on your website. You can download it for free from wordpress.org and it is a very popular WordPress plugin.

After activating the plugin, click on Settings >> Link Checker.

Then click on the “Looks for Links in” tab and select Posts, Pages, Comments or wherever you want to find Broken links.

Now, click on the “Save changes” button.

Now you can see the Broken links status of your site on the General tab.

Sometimes plugin may take time to check Broken links and it depends on your site how big is your site so, wait for some time. You can see in the below screenshot.

How to Fix Broken Links in WordPress Blog

To fix broken links, click on Tools >> Broken links. By clicking on the Broken tab, you can see all the broken links on your site along with the status codes.

Now move your mouse pointer to the Broken link. You will see many options appear.

This plugin also shows the status code next to your broken links. You can simply click on the “unlink” link to fix broken links. But I would recommend that you update the link instead of unlink.

Note: If you are using Affiliate Links, then you will see those links as redirected links, so do not fix Affiliate Links.

After you have fixed Broken links on your site, uninstall the plugin from your site.

The Broken Link Checker plugin adds a number of tables ( _blc_filters, _blc_instances, _blc_links, _blc_synch) to your WordPress database that can slow down your website.

You can use WP-DB Manager plugin or Plugins Garbage Collector to delete these tables

Other Methods to Find and Fix Broken Links in WordPress

Most popular managed WordPress hosting companies such as GoDaddy and WP Engine block the Broken Link Checker plugin so that no user can install it. Because it uses a lot of system resources and slows down your website.

If you also use any such hosting, then you can use the method shown below and fix Broken Links from your site.

1. Using the Online Broken Link Checker Tool

You can use the online Broken Link Checker Tool to find Broken Link – BrokenLinkCheck.com.
It is very easy to use, you just need to add your website URL and click on Find broken links.
Next, enter the security code and select Find broken links now!

This tool will list all the broken internal and external links. Also tell in which page the broken link is present.

2. Finding Broken Links in WordPress Using Google Search Console

Google Search Console is the best tool developed by Google to find out how your site is performing in Google. It tells you about other errors including 404 errors.

After logging in to your Google Search Console account, click Coverage.

You will see 404 errors under the Errors or Excluded tab.

You can also use Ahrefs and SEMrush. Both include very powerful site audit tools that automatically scan your WordPress site for errors.

Apart from this, there are many other popular options like Screaming Frog and W3C Link Checker.

Screaming Frog – This is an SEO tool that helps you find broken links. But you have to download it.
W3C Link Checker – Simply enter your website URL. It will show you the broken link.

I have shown you different ways to find broken links. You can use any.

Fixing Broken Links

The best way to fix any broken links is to redirect them to another similar page. If a similar article does not exist on your site, you can delete the link.

But you have to set 301 redirect.

First, install the Redirection plugin. After activating the plugin, click on Tools >> Redirection and set up redirects.

Then add your broken link to the Source URL field and the new URL to the Target URL field. Leave the rest of the settings default.

Then, click on the Add Redirect button. Now you can visit their site to check it.

Repeat the process for all broken links on your website.

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Conclusion

Broken links are bad for both user experience and SEO, so you should check and fix broken links on your site from time to time.

I want to say again, Broken Link Checker plugin is the best. But it can slow down your site. So after finding and fixing Broken Link, remove it from your site. Hope this article helped you to remove Broken links from your site.