Tip: Fixing Broken Links in WordPress
Recently, I found myself converting my jewelry website from Textpattern to WordPress. Due to future plans for a shop setup, I also had to change the permalink structure. While WordPress is great for handling redirects, I soon realized I still needed something to handle the broken links I created with the platform change within the posts.
The Broken Chain by Mesho0o0o, on Flickr
With over 2700+ links on the site, I had no intentions of checking each and every one individually. After a quick plug-in search, I found Broken Link Checker for WordPress.
What Broken Link Checker did for my blog was priceless. Running through every single post on the site, it cataloged all the links, marked which ones were redirected automatically by WordPress and then listed all the broken links on the site. It also added CSS to the site that applied a strikethru style to all the broken links. I found that very helpful.
The most useful features of Broken Link Checker are all centralized in its Tool panel. From one location, you can get details on the link, view the post in which it’s used, edit or remove it. Finally, if you use the same link more than once, one edit from the Tool panel fixes all instances of that link!
When I started working on correcting all the broken links, I had over 400+ and was seriously not looking forward to how long it would take me to do that. However, with this plug-in, I quickly found myself completing my broken link project in just under 2 hours. You can imagine how happy I was about that.
How about you…do you have a plug-in that simplified a task for you? I’d love to hear about it!
[...] One of the problems I encountered when moving this website from Textpattern to WordPress was an issue with broken links. I won’t bore you with all the technical details (but in case you want to be bored, you can read the more detailed post on my web development blog). [...]