Had helpful error codes, but you still have to manually fix links

  • Unlike the other link fixing plugins I tried, this one had very helpful error codes that told me why the scan was not working – first telling me to turn of one of my plugins and then to change my robots.txt file.

    The scan ran, but was limited without paying. I wouldn’t have minded paying, however, unfortunately the results weren’t that useful. This is because:

    1) It lists category and tag archives as pages (so you have a broken link in a post then in every category archive that post shows up in)
    2) You still have to manually go into the post/page and change the broken link (other plugins give you 1 click solutions)

    It basically gives you the same thing as you get from any other link scanning tool (Moz, screaming frog, etc) but in WordPress. What I needed is a tool to speed up the process of fixing all the links I have in my download of broken from Moz, and this does not do that.

    However, I gave it 3 starts because hopefully it will help me run the other plugins which allow me to fix links more quickly!

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Plugin Author Marco Beierer

    (@mbsec)

    Hi @annafjmorris

    Thank you for your review.

    —

    1) The Link Checker does not make a difference between the page types and also does not know the type of each page, so it does not ignore category archives.

    However, it provides a function to mark a link as fixed on all pages, which can be helpful to cleanup the results quickly once that link was fixed.

    This may not work in every case, because maybe the same link is also in another post, but this one you would find with the next check.

    One big advantage of this technical approach is, that it finds all broken links on your website. Other link checker plugins that check the content locally, just find broken links in the supported parts of your website, for example in posts.

    —

    2) I have decided not to implement a 1 click solution for two reasons.

    One is that is very hard to do because how the Link Checker technically works. It does crawl your site like a normal visitor and thus does not know about the internal structure and it would be very time consuming to implement a 1 click solution feature.

    The other reason is that I don’t think just removing links is a good way to fix your broken links. In the most cases it would be much better to rewrite larger parts of the article to keep the quality of the page up.

    The only thing the Link Checker does to help you in these cases, is to provide quick links to the editor with the affected post opened, so that you can edit your posts quickly.

    I’m also planning to show the link anchor text in the results so that you can find the broken links in the posts faster.

    —

    I hope this gives some context.

    Best regards
    Marco

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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