Quiet Link Checker

Quiet Link Checker finds broken links and broken images in your posts, pages, custom post types and (optionally) comments, and lets you fix them in one click.

It is called quiet because it stays out of the way: it works in the background without slowing your site, it never nags you, and it talks to no server other than the ones your links point to.

It is built around three promises:

• It does not slow your site down. Checks run in the background in short, time-boxed batches, never during your visitors’ page loads. You choose how many requests run in parallel, how long each batch may work and how long to pause between requests. It never sends two requests at the same time to the same external site.
• Everything stays on your server. No account, no sign-up, no cloud service, no tracking. The only outgoing requests are the checks of the links in your own content.
• No upsell noise. No banners, no nags, no dashboard ads. The free plugin is complete.

What it checks

• Links (<a href>) and images (<img src>) in published content of the post types you choose.
• Links in approved comments (optional).
• Broken links (404, 410 and other 4xx/5xx errors), redirects (301/302…) and timeouts.
• Internal and external links. Relative URLs are resolved against each page.

How it decides a link is broken

• It sends a light HEAD request first and falls back to GET when a server does not answer HEAD properly (many reply 403/405 to HEAD and 200 to GET).
• 404 and 410 are reported straight away, and so are pages or images that now redirect to the site’s home page (a “soft 404”: the content was removed). Server errors (5xx), “too many requests” (429) and timeouts are retried later with backoff (5 min, 20 min, 80 min…) before being reported, so a site that was down for a minute does not fill your list with false alarms.
• Each URL is checked once, however many pages use it, and links that worked are cached for a number of days you choose.

Quick actions

From the list of problems, for each link:

• Edit URL – replaces it everywhere it appears (all posts and comments) without touching the rest of your markup or blocks.
• Remove link – removes the link but keeps its text.
• Ignore – hides it from the problems list and stops checking it.
• Recheck – checks it again right now.

Edits are saved as normal post updates, so a revision is stored and you can always undo them from the post’s revisions.

Filters and search

Views for problems, broken links, redirects, timeouts, links being retried and ignored links; filter by links or images; search by URL or link text; sort by URL, status, detection date or last check.

Built for big sites

• Its own database tables (nothing piled into wp_options or postmeta).
• Nothing is loaded on the front end and its assets only load on its own admin screen.
• Pause, resume or stop a scan at any time.
• WP-CLI commands for system cron on large sites: wp quiet-link-checker scan, wp quiet-link-checker run, wp quiet-link-checker status.

Privacy

Quiet Link Checker does not collect, store or send any personal data, and it does not contact any server of its own. To check a link it requests that link’s URL from your server, as a visitor’s browser would, identifying itself with the user agent QuietLinkChecker/1.0 (+your site URL). If you enable the robots.txt option, it also requests /robots.txt from each linked site once a day.