A Wordpress LifeSaver

Or link saver, really.

WordPress nerds, take heed….

I’ve just discovered a WordPress plugin that anyone running a self hosted WordPress site NEEDS to know about. It’s called Broken Link Checker.

Basically, it trawls your blog and looks for links that don’t work, bringing you back a handy list. I just put it through Vivid Scribe and was SO surprised by how many links were bringing 404 errors, something I’m usually pretty careful in dealing with.  A lot of them were links I’d made to other sites where the content had moved or gone, some were from stuff I’d moved about on my own pages, but some were just bad linking on my part.

Having 404 links on your site can impede your Google rankings so it’s important to keep an eye on them. It’ll be interesting to see if this little gem of a plug-in increases my traffic in anyway after today.

It has slowed down my site quite a bit though – and a slow loading site also hurts your Google juice – so I would probably disable it once I’m done today and set it up again every few weeks to keep things under control.

I love finding cool and handy things like this, so just wanted to share.

Happy Blogging!

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