Link Checker
What is Link Checker?
Link Checker is a tool to scan and find problem links on a website. To use Link Checker, navigate to the “Link checker” section of the “Tools” tab of a site in Local.
Why use the Link Checker Add-on?
Manually checking for broken links is tedious, and automated solutions like those used by WordPress plugins can be very taxing on a system. If you think about what is trying to be done, the machine needs to:
- Open each page on a site
- Scan that page, and open each link to see if the link still works
Because of this, we recommend using a tool like Link Checker within Local so that it’s not running on the production site and competing for resources with the requests made by your end-users.
Additionally, because this is running on your offline machine, you don’t risk exposing new content to the world before it’s been published.
note
Remember that Local’s Link Checker has to open each page of a site and verify that each link points to an active target.
Depending on the hardware of the machine and the size of the site, this can take quite a while.
Where can I get Link Checker?
The easiest way to get Link Checker is to install it from the Add-ons tab within Local.
Using Link Checker
Once the add-on is installed and enabled, navigate to the “Link Checker” page under the “Tools” tab of a site.
Click the “Scan for Links” button to have Link Checker scan the site for problem links.
Once a scan is done, you can examine the list of links and quickly connect to the edit page within the WordPress admin. This list of links is persistent, so for a scan that has many broken links, you can close Local and return to this list at a later time.
