The Link Checker for WordPress uses an external service to crawl your website and find broken links and images on your website.

In contrast to search engine tools like the Google Search Console, which only show if a URL on your website is not reachable, it does not matter for the Link Checker if the links leads to an internal or external URL. The Link Checker will find all dead links.

The Link Checker works for every plugin out of the box. The computation costs for your website is also very low because the crawler does the heavy work and just acts like a normal visitor, who visits all pages of you website once.

Limitations of the free version

The Link Checker can be used for free, but the free version is limited. You can check websites with up to 500 URLs. Advanced features like image or video checks, CSV export, scheduler support, and form login support aren’t available in the free version.

The service cannot be offered free of charge for larger websites because the crawling is done by servers operated by the plugin developer and renting and maintaining these servers isn’t cheap.

Videos

You can find videos about the Link Checker on the Link Checker for WordPress playlist on YouTube.

Features

Simple setup.
Works out of the box with all WordPress plugins.
Low computation costs for your webserver.
Lists all broken links and redirects on your website.
Support for Polylang (probably also WPML) sites.

Technical Features

Respects your robots.txt file (also the crawl-delay directive).
- You can use the user-agents MB-LinkChecker to control the crawler.

Additional Features of Link Checker Pro

Check if embedded internal and external images are broken.
Check if embedded YouTube videos are broken.
Scheduler to automatically check a website once a day and get a summary report by email.
The result can be exported as CSV file.
Form login support to check protected pages like membership areas.
The result is saved on the Link Checker server so that it can be fetched multiple times without requiring a recheck. For example from different users or with different browsers.

Upcoming Features

Support for checking the availability of videos, CSS files and JS files.

Technical Requirements

Works with WordPress 4.7 or newer on PHP 5.6 or newer.

Use of an External Server

The Link Checker uses an external server, operated by the developer of the plugin, to crawl your website and detect broken links. This means, that there is some communication between your website and the server. The only data that is communicated to the external server by your website is the URL of your website and the fact that you are using WordPress. The server than crawlers your website (as a normal visitor does) and answers with a list of the found broken links.