Broken links on your website are not only bad for SEO but also your user experience. Over time, links can change or become broken, not only within your website, but on external sites you have linked to. Particularly news sites and other blogs.
If you’re not setup to track and monitor broken links you will never really know if and when this happens.
There is however, an easy solution.
The answer
Monitoring for broken links should be easy, and it is. It’s as easy as installing a plugin on your WordPress website called Broken Link Checker by Janis Elsts. This plugin gets installed by default on every WordPress website we manage.
Broken Link Checker monitors links in your posts, pages, comments and any custom fields you specify in its settings. If a broken link is detected it will send your website admin and post author an email notification to inform you a broken link exists. You can also access broken links from within your WordPress dashboard.
It can’t get any easier
Once a broken link is detected and you have received notification by email, or simply logged straight into your website admin, you can manage the broken link from within the Broken Link Checker dashboard. You can edit the link, delete or remove it completely from the code or change its status — all without having to go into the post or page that contains the link to edit and update. It can’t get any easier.