Are wondering what online tools you can use, to check if your website has broken links? Or How to fix broken links in WordPress? You’ve come to the right place. I will be answering these questions in this two-part series “How to Find and Fix broken links in WordPress?”
Broken links leave a negative impact on your website visitors and search engine spiders. When people click on a broken link within your website, they may be inclined to leave your site. This is especially true if your 404 error page is not optimized.
These broken links can also affect your website in terms of Search Engine Optimization. I mentioned in my article, “Optimizing Your 404 Error pages” that this can affect your website ranking. This is because a search engine spider might encounter a broken link (i.e. reach a dead end) and so be unable to discover the rest of your site.
How to find or check broken links within your website?
There is a variety of ways to check if your website has broken links. Below are some ways you can do it for free:
If you have a Google Webmaster Account, go to Diagnostics. Click Crawl errors and you will see pages that are flagged with a 404 error along with where it was linked from.
You can also use a broken link tool. It is possible to check online using a broken link checker such as http://www.2bone.com/links/linkchecker.shtml. Just enter the URL of your web page, it will analyze the page and display it’s findings. Just a note, with this online broken link checker you cannot test javascript links and Flash objects, only regular HTML links.
If your website is running on the WordPress platform, there’s a free plugin you can download to monitor your links, funnily enough it’s called the “broken link checker”. The plugin will check your blog every 24 hours, 72 hours or at any time you choose. You also have the option of whether to check regular HTML links only or YouTube video embed codes, as well.
In my next article, I’ll tell you how you can fix broken links easily. Stay tuned.
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