Broken Link Checker by WPMU DEV: Full Review and Setup Guide
Broken links quietly hurt both SEO and user experience — a visitor who clicks a dead link and lands on a 404 page often just leaves. Broken Link Checker by WPMU DEV is one of the more capable plugins for finding and fixing these across a WordPress site, with both a free local scanner and a more thorough cloud-based option. Here’s how it works and how to set it up properly.
The Short Version
- Two scanning modes: local (free, runs on your own server) and cloud (via a free WPMU DEV account, more accurate and thorough)
- Checks plain text URLs, embedded links, and even YouTube video/playlist embeds for broken references
- Default recheck interval is every 72 hours, adjustable in settings, with optional email alerts
- Cloud scanning checks a much larger set of links than local scanning on the same site — worth using if accuracy matters more than staying fully self-hosted
- Best fit: any site with more than a handful of posts, where manually checking every outbound link isn’t realistic
Installing and Running Your First Scan
- Go to Plugins → Add New, search for “Broken Link Checker” by WPMU DEV, install and activate it
- A new “Link Checker” menu item appears in your dashboard — open it
- Choose between a Local scan (runs on your own server) or Cloud scan (via a free WPMU DEV account)
- For a first-pass local scan, click “Local,” then “All” to see every checked link and its status
Reading the Results
Status codes matter here. A 200 means the link works fine. A 403 (Forbidden) doesn’t necessarily mean the link is broken — some sites, including YouTube, block automated link-checking tools from reading their pages, so a 403 on a YouTube URL is usually a false alarm rather than a real broken link. A genuinely broken link shows up clearly flagged, often alongside any redirect chain the plugin detected on the way to the dead end.
Local Scan vs. Cloud Scan
| Local Scan | Cloud Scan | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free, no account needed | Free WPMU DEV account required |
| Runs on | Your own server resources | WPMU DEV’s cloud infrastructure |
| Coverage | Good for smaller sites | Noticeably more thorough — can check tens of thousands of links on a larger site |
| Server load | Uses your hosting’s CPU/bandwidth | No load on your own server |
For a larger site, the cloud scan is worth the two-minute account setup — it checks a meaningfully larger set of URLs than the local scanner on an identical site, without using your own hosting resources to do it.
Key Settings Worth Configuring
- Check frequency — defaults to every 72 hours; increase or decrease based on how often you publish and link to external sites
- Email notifications — enter an email address to get alerted automatically when a new broken link is found, rather than having to check the dashboard manually
- Content types to check — you can include comments and custom post types, not just standard posts and pages
- Link types — plain text URLs, embedded links, and embedded YouTube videos/playlists can each be toggled independently
- Timeout threshold — a link taking longer than the configured timeout (30 seconds by default) gets flagged as broken, which is worth raising slightly if you link to known-slow third-party sites
Fixing a Broken Link Once Found
Once the scan flags a broken link, click through to see which post contains it, confirm the destination really is dead (a quick manual visit rules out a temporary outage), then edit that post directly to either update the URL to a working replacement or remove the link entirely if no good replacement exists. For internal links specifically — like our own WP Event Manager review — this plugin also catches broken cross-links between your own posts, not just external ones, which is easy to miss doing this manually.
Why Broken Links Are a Bigger Problem Than They Look
A single dead link rarely matters. The problem is that link rot compounds over time — plugins get discontinued, companies rebrand and change their domain structure, blog posts you linked to get deleted, and affiliate programs shut down or rewrite their URL structure. On a site that has been publishing for a couple of years, it is normal to have dozens of links quietly go dead without anyone noticing, because nobody re-clicks old links inside their own published posts.
The cost shows up in two places. For readers, a broken link mid-article breaks trust — it signals the page has not been maintained, and on a review or tutorial site that undermines the exact credibility the content is trying to build. For search engines, Google’s crawlers also follow outbound links, and a page riddled with dead ones is a weak (if minor) quality signal, especially on pages Google already considers borderline. Fixing broken links is one of the few maintenance tasks that costs almost nothing and has no real downside.
How to Install and Set Up Broken Link Checker
Setup takes a few minutes on a standard WordPress install:
- Go to Plugins → Add New Plugin in wp-admin, search for “Broken Link Checker by WPMU DEV,” install and activate it.
- Open the plugin’s settings screen. You will see the choice between local scanning (works immediately, no account needed) and cloud scanning (requires linking a free WPMU DEV account).
- Set which content types to scan — posts, pages, and any custom post types your theme or plugins register (product pages, portfolio items, etc. are easy to forget here).
- Choose which link types to check: plain text URLs, links wrapped in anchor tags, and embedded YouTube videos/playlists.
- Leave the recheck interval on its default (72 hours) unless the site publishes very frequently, in which case a shorter interval catches problems sooner.
- Turn on email alerts so broken links get flagged without needing to manually revisit the plugin’s dashboard.
- Run the first scan. On a site with a large back catalog of posts, the first scan takes noticeably longer than later ones — let it finish before judging the results.
Free Local Scan vs. Cloud Scan: Which One to Use
The free local scanner runs entirely on your own hosting and works well for smaller sites. It checks links the same way a browser would, which is reliable but uses your server’s resources while it runs — on cheap shared hosting with a large site, this can be noticeable during the scan window.
The cloud scan runs on WPMU DEV’s own servers instead of yours, so it does not touch your hosting resources at all, and in practice it checks a broader set of links more consistently than the local scanner does on the same site. It requires only a free WPMU DEV account to enable — no paid membership is needed to use this specific feature. For a site with a growing archive of posts, the cloud option is worth turning on from the start rather than switching later once the local scan starts feeling slow.
Broken Link Checker vs. Other Ways to Handle Dead Links
This is not the only way to manage link health in WordPress, and it is worth knowing where it fits:
- All-in-one SEO plugins (Rank Math, Yoast, AIOSEO) — some include a basic redirect manager, but none of the popular ones actively crawl your published content looking for dead outbound links the way this plugin does. They solve a different problem (setting up redirects after you already know a URL changed).
- Redirection plugin — good for catching 404s that real visitors hit on your own site, tracked after the fact. It will not proactively scan your content for links that are already broken; it only reacts to traffic.
- Manual link audits — clicking through every link in every post works, but it does not scale past a handful of posts and nobody actually keeps this up long-term. This is the gap this plugin fills.
In practice, the combination that works well is Broken Link Checker to proactively find dead outbound and internal links, plus a redirect plugin to handle URLs that moved but are still fixable with a 301.
Common Causes of Broken Links on a WordPress Site
A few patterns show up repeatedly once you start scanning an older site:
- Linked-to plugins or themes get discontinued — a review site is especially exposed here, since official plugin/theme pages sometimes disappear entirely when a product is abandoned.
- Affiliate and partner programs restructure their links — URL parameters and tracking IDs change format, breaking old outbound affiliate links even though the destination site still exists.
- Cited articles get taken down or paywalled — especially on news and blog sources that do not maintain permanent URLs.
- Internal links break after a slug change — renaming a post’s URL for SEO without setting up a redirect breaks every internal link pointing to the old slug, including links from other posts on the same site.
- HTTP vs HTTPS mismatches — older links written before a site enabled SSL sometimes point to the non-secure version and never get updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the free local scan good enough, or do I need the cloud version?
For a small site, local scanning is enough. For a larger site with hundreds of posts and external links, the cloud scan’s broader coverage catches meaningfully more broken links.
Will scanning slow down my site?
Local scans use your own server resources while running, which can be briefly noticeable on shared hosting with a large site. Cloud scanning avoids this entirely since the checking happens on WPMU DEV’s infrastructure instead.
Why does the plugin flag YouTube links as errors when they work fine?
YouTube (and some other platforms) block automated tools from reading their pages, which returns a 403 status even though the link itself works normally for a real visitor. Treat 403s on major platforms as false positives rather than genuinely broken links.
Does this check links inside comments too?
Yes — comment content can be included in the scan through the plugin’s content-type settings, which is useful since comment spam often includes dead or malicious links.
How often should I re-scan my site?
The default 72-hour interval works for most sites. If you publish frequently and link out to external resources often, checking daily catches broken links faster, at the cost of slightly more server activity for local scans.
The Bottom Line
Broken Link Checker by WPMU DEV handles a genuinely tedious maintenance task well — finding dead links before your visitors do. The local scan is a solid free starting point; upgrading to the cloud scan is worth it once your site has grown past a couple dozen posts with meaningful outbound linking.
