Sometimes, often, blog posts can disappear. Well they don’t necessarily disappear, they may just move for some reason. It happens. Or you may have deleted something very old that is no longer relevant. Or if you have moved your website and/or blog into your hosted WordPress, well there are bound to be some stray links…

What you want to do is know of the links, if possible, and to suggest alternative pages for those defunct pages.

The Broken Link Checker plugin does exactly that – it monitors your blog and lets you know of any broken links:

1. Plugins, Add New, search for Broken Link Checker and install
2. Go to Settings, Link Checker and take a look at what it found (it is that quick)
3. If you have any broken links, a link is provided for you to view these. We had a broken link to an external image from one of our blog posts – so knew to change that.
4. Set a frequency for the links to be checked – the default is 72 hours but to be honest I think weekly is sufficient (that’s 168 hours)

There you go – now there’s no excuse for broken links in your WordPress blog and/or website.