Links break. Silently.
External sites get redesigned. Pages get deleted without redirects. Domains expire. On any WordPress site that's been publishing for more than a year, broken links are almost guaranteed.
Google treats dead outbound links as a maintenance signal. Visitors who land on a 404 lose trust. Internal broken links create dead ends that block crawlers from indexing your content.
The worst part: you usually find out months later, from an SEO audit or a frustrated reader.
What most people do instead
The common approaches all come with baggage.
A better way: scan on demand, fix what's broken
Open the TrueCommander navigator. Type scan broken links. Hit enter.
The command checks every URL in your published content, tells you exactly which links are broken, which post they're in, and gives you a direct edit link to fix them. No background process. No ongoing resource cost.
Runs only when you ask. No background crawler. No database tables. No impact on your site's frontend performance.
How it works
Smart batching that handles sites of any size.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Command name | scan broken links |
| Posts per batch | 50 |
| URLs per batch | Up to 200 |
| Timeout per URL | 5 seconds |
| Post type filter | -post_type=page or product |
| Progress | Auto-resume, 24h expiry on stale scans |
| Can be used in |
Real example
You run an affiliate blog with 340 published posts. Each post links to 3-5 external product pages. You haven't checked links in over a year.
First run: 50 posts scanned, 127 links checked, 4 broken. Two are 404s from a vendor that redesigned their site. One is a 410 Gone from a discontinued product. One timed out — the domain expired entirely.
You click the edit links, fix them in 3 minutes, and run the command again. Next 50 posts, 2 more broken links. Seven runs later, your entire site is audited.
You add it to Cron Schedules to run daily. From now on, a broken link gets caught within 24 hours instead of sitting there for months hurting your SEO.
Goes further with TrueCommander
One scan is useful. Automated scanning is how you keep links healthy permanently.
Featured in:The 15-minute weekly maintenance routine — part of a 6-command workflow that keeps every site healthy.