Link Checker
The Link Checker Addon for Local has been archived. Originally, Link Checker was a useful tool for scanning and identifying problem links on your WordPress site without affecting your live production environment. It helped prevent new content from being exposed prematurely and saved system resources by running scans offline.
We recommend exploring alternative tools to manage broken links on your website.
note
You can find the source code and historical releases for the Link Checker Addon on GitHub: local-addon-broken-link-checker.
Alternatives
Tools that can be used for scanning a site for broken links roughly fall into two categories:
- WordPress Plugins
- Cli tools
Both groups of tools work well. In the case of a WordPress plugin to scan for broken links, you will likely want to use the plugins within a development site in Local or utilize a premium service that scans for links on the Plugin’s dedicated servers.
Broken Link Checker
The WPMU Dev Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin has both a “Cloud” scanner and a “Local” scanner. The Cloud scanning functionality is part of their premium service, but you can always install the free Broken Link Checker plugin from within the WP-Admin of the site.
If you do opt for the “Local” version, we recommend only using it within your dev sites in Local so that scanning doesn’t compete for resources on the production site for real end-users.
linkchecker
The linkchecker open-source project is a cli tool written in Python that can be run on your local machine.
muffet
The muffet open-source project is a cli tool, written in Go and is quite fast. So fast that I was quickly rate-limited and received a number of 429 HTTP response codes. There are many options for throttling requests as well as changing the list of accepted response code.
lychee
The lychee open-source project is written in Rust and is also quite fast.
