Linkmender – Broken Link Scanner

Linkmender scans the published content on your site, checks every link and image it finds, and shows you what is broken, what redirects, and what needs a second look. Then it lets you fix things without leaving the results screen.

Everything runs on your own server. There is no account to create, no API key, no usage quota and no data sent to a third party.

What it checks

• <a href> links (internal and external) and <img src> images in posts, pages and public custom post types
• Optionally, links stored in custom fields (post meta)
• In-page anchors (#section) are recorded but not fetched

What you get

• A dashboard with counts of broken links, redirects, warnings and orphan pages
• An Orphan pages tab listing published pages that nothing on your site links to
• A sortable, searchable results table with status and type filters
• Row and bulk actions: Recheck, Edit URL (replaces the URL inside the post), Unlink (removes the tag, keeps the text), Ignore / Unignore
• A WordPress Dashboard widget with the current link health
• A “Last full scan” indicator and a progress bar while a scan runs

How it stays lightweight

• Scans run in the background in small batches (20 URLs per run by default) using WP-Cron single events
• Keeping the Linkmender screen open acts as a keep-alive so scans progress even on sites where WP-Cron is slow
• Each URL is checked once per scan even if it appears in many posts
• HEAD requests first, with a small ranged GET fallback for servers that refuse HEAD
• Network errors are retried with exponential back-off before a link is marked broken
• Content is re-parsed automatically when a post is saved, so results stay current between scans

Orphan pages

An orphan is a published post or page that no other post on your site links to. Readers and search engines can usually only reach it through your sitemap, so it tends to be overlooked no matter how good it is. Linking to it from a relevant post is normally all it takes.

Linkmender builds this from the internal links it already found during a scan, so finding orphans costs no extra requests — it is a query, not a crawl.

Be aware of one limit: Linkmender reads links from post content and, when enabled, custom fields. Navigation menus, widgets and theme templates are not scanned, so a page linked only from your menu is still listed as an orphan. Add such pages to Settings → Exclude post IDs to silence them. Your front page and blog posts page are excluded automatically.

Statuses

• OK — 2xx response
• Redirect — 3xx response; the redirect target is recorded
• Broken — 4xx/5xx response, or unreachable after 3 attempts
• Warning — a network error that will be retried

Privacy

Linkmender only ever contacts the URLs that appear in your own content, from your own server, with a clear user agent. It does not phone home, does not collect analytics and does not display promotional notices.

Extending

Developers can hook into the plugin: lmnd_parsed_links, lmnd_pre_check_url, lmnd_check_result, lmnd_http_args, lmnd_scan_complete, lmnd_link_checked, lmnd_bulk_action, lmnd_row_actions, lmnd_admin_tabs, lmnd_pro_features, lmnd_link_target_post_id, lmnd_orphan_excluded_posts, lmnd_orphan_row_actions and more.