Despite all best intentions, broken links are a fact of life on any website that’s been going for longer than a few months. Even if you rigorously follow the advice I gave a few days ago about redirecting urls, you can only control your own urls this way. But what about all those external pages you point to in your posts? If one of those sites closes down, or is less conscientious about maintaining the integrity of their site, broken links appear on your site!
Now, there is no shortage of link checkers on the internet, but for all you WordPress-ers, there’s an easier way – the broken link checker plugin. I recently installed and ran it on one of the sites I look after, and it came up with a list of more than 20 broken links – I had no idea!