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 a bounded set of content links and reports confirmed broken, restricted, unsafe, or unverified results. It supplies continuation cursors for further attended batches and uses network and server resources.
Shown in advanced mode, where commands start with tp. In easy mode you type the same command without the tp prefix.
Runs only when you ask. No background crawler. No database tables. Each run uses site and network resources; measure the impact on your own hosting.
How it works
Bounded batches with explicit continuation cursors.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Command name | scan broken links |
| Posts per batch | Default 20; maximum 50 |
| Link occurrences per batch | Default 50; maximum 100 |
| Classification | 404/410 broken; other restricted, unsafe, or inconclusive results are separate |
| Post type filter | -post_type=page or product |
| Progress | Explicit post/link cursors; no automatic continuation |
| 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.
For example, one bounded run can report confirmed 404/410 links alongside restricted, unsafe, or unverified destinations. A timeout is inconclusive, not proof that a URL is broken.
Review the reported content, edit the links that need correction, then continue using the returned post and link cursors. Inspect omitted and unverified results before judging coverage.
Repeat link checks as attended work from Navigator, a shortcut, or a compatible manual macro. This command does not support Scheduled Commands.
Goes further with TrueCommander
Treat each run as a bounded snapshot. Repeat checks and continue explicitly to review more content; it is not continuous monitoring.
Featured in: The 15-minute weekly maintenance routine, part of a 6-command workflow that keeps every site healthy.