swiftspeed

<p>Link Diagnostics is a comprehensive link analysis tool that scans your WordPress site for link issues and provides detailed intelligence about your internal linking structure. If you’re serious about SEO and site maintenance, this plugin gives you the visibility you need to keep your links healthy.</p>
<p>For a detailed feature breakdown, screenshots, and technical overview, see the official<br />
<a href="https://swiftspeed.app/link-diagnostic-and-insights-plugin/" rel="nofollow ugc">Link Diagnostic and Insights product page</a>.</p>
<h4>Why Link Health Matters for SEO</h4>
<p>Over time, your site accumulates link problems. You delete old posts, change slugs, restructure content. Automated or manual redirect plugins create chains. External sites you have linked to in the past go offline. The result:</p>
<ul>
<li>Redirect chains that waste crawl budget and slow page speed</li>
<li>Broken internal links that hurt user experience and rankings</li>
<li>Orphaned content that search engines can’t discover</li>
<li>Dead external links that signal poor maintenance</li>
<li>Inefficient internal linking that fails to pass authority to important pages</li>
</ul>
<p>These issues directly impact your SEO health score in tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Screaming Frog. Link Diagnostics helps you fix them systematically.</p>
<h4>Internal Link Health – The Big Win</h4>
<p>This is where the plugin delivers maximum value. When you change a URL or delete a post, redirect plugins create a 301 redirect. Fine for visitors, but now you have anchor texts across your site linking to URLs that redirect elsewhere. Every redirect hop wastes crawl budget and dilutes link equity, seo tools detect it and tell you to fix, but then, your site is large, how many do you want to start fixing one after the other? well, that’s why this plugin exists.</p>
<p><strong>What Link Diagnostics does:</strong></p>
<p>Scans every post and finds anchor texts linking to redirected URLs. You see:</p>
<ul>
<li>The post containing the link</li>
<li>The anchor text used</li>
<li>The current URL being linked to</li>
<li>Where that URL redirects to</li>
<li>The redirect type (301, 302, 307, 308)</li>
</ul>
<p>Click “Fix” and the plugin updates the anchor’s href to point directly to the final destination. No more redirect chains. Your internal links point exactly where they should.</p>
<p>For a deeper explanation of how internal redirect chains affect crawl efficiency and SEO performance, refer to the<br />
<a href="https://swiftspeed.app/link-diagnostic-and-insights-plugin/" rel="nofollow ugc">Link Diagnostic and Insights documentation</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Why this matters:</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Preserves crawl budget by eliminating unnecessary redirects</li>
<li>Passes full link equity directly to target pages</li>
<li>Improves page speed (fewer redirect hops)</li>
<li>Boosts SEO health scores dramatically</li>
<li>Strengthens your internal linking structure</li>
</ul>
<p>This one feature alone can move your site health score from 60% to 90%+ in SEO tools.</p>
<h4>Other Internal Link Issues Detected</h4>
<p>Beyond redirects, the plugin finds:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>404 Errors</strong>: Broken internal links where the target page doesn’t exist</li>
<li><strong>410 Gone</strong>: Links to permanently deleted content</li>
<li><strong>500 Errors</strong>: Server errors on internal URLs</li>
<li><strong>Redirect Chains</strong>: Multiple redirect hops before reaching destination</li>
</ul>
<p>Each issue shows the source post, anchor text, problematic URL, and HTTP status code. Fix them directly from the admin panel.</p>
<h4>External Link Error Detection</h4>
<p>Your outbound links matter too. Link Diagnostics scans external links and reports:</p>
<ul>
<li>404 and 410 errors (broken external links)</li>
<li>5xx server errors (unreliable external sites)</li>
<li>DNS failures and timeouts (unreachable domains)</li>
<li>Redirect chains on external URLs</li>
</ul>
<p>You see which posts contain broken external links and can update or remove them to maintain content quality.</p>
<h4>Link Intelligence – Understand Your Link Structure</h4>
<p>This is the strategic part. Beyond finding problems, Link Diagnostics analyzes your entire link structure to reveal:</p>
<p><strong>Most Linked Internal Pages</strong></p>
<p>See which pages receive the most internal links. These are your content hubs and authority pages. You can:</p>
<ul>
<li>Verify your most important pages are well-linked</li>
<li>Find pages that are over-linked or under-linked</li>
<li>Identify pillar content opportunities</li>
<li>Balance internal link distribution</li>
</ul>
<p>Each page shows total inbound links and expandable details listing every source post with the exact anchor texts used.</p>
<p><strong>Common Anchor Texts</strong></p>
<p>Discover which anchor texts you use most frequently. This helps you:</p>
<ul>
<li>Spot over-optimization (too many exact-match anchors)</li>
<li>Find opportunities for natural language variation</li>
<li>Maintain consistency across your content</li>
<li>Avoid anchor text patterns that look spammy</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>External Domains Analysis</strong></p>
<p>See which external sites you link to most often. This reveals:</p>
<ul>
<li>Your most frequently cited sources</li>
<li>Over-reliance on specific domains</li>
<li>Opportunities to diversify external links</li>
<li>External relationships worth maintaining</li>
</ul>
<p>For each domain, see which posts link to it and what anchor texts are used.</p>
<p><strong>Orphaned Pages</strong></p>
<p>Find content with zero internal links. These pages are invisible to crawlers and users. Link Diagnostics lists every orphaned page so you can:</p>
<ul>
<li>Add internal links from relevant content</li>
<li>Improve site-wide content discovery</li>
<li>Boost the authority of isolated pages</li>
<li>Ensure all content is accessible</li>
</ul>
<h4>URL Redirect Management</h4>
<p>Built-in redirect manager handles site restructuring and migrations:</p>
<ul>
<li>Create 301, 302, 307, and 308 redirects</li>
<li>Add multiple source URLs to one destination in bulk</li>
<li>Organize redirects with categories</li>
<li>Toggle redirects active/inactive without deletion</li>
<li>Bulk delete operations</li>
<li>Source URL uniqueness validation prevents conflicts</li>
</ul>
<p>Perfect for handling old URLs after site migrations or content reorganization.</p>
<h4>How Scanning Works</h4>
<p>Click “Start Scan” on any tab. The plugin:</p>
<ol>
<li>Queries your published content (posts, pages, custom post types)</li>
<li>Extracts all links from post content</li>
<li>Checks each URL via WordPress HTTP API</li>
<li>Stores results in custom database tables</li>
<li>Shows progress in real-time</li>
</ol>
<p>Scans are on-demand only. No background processing, no automated changes. You control when to scan and what to fix.</p>
<h3>Credits</h3>
<p>Developed by <a href="https://akinolaakeem.com" rel="nofollow ugc">Àgbà Akin</a><br />
Managed by <a href="https://swiftspeed.org" rel="nofollow ugc">Ssu-Technology Limited</a><br />
Product documentation and feature overview maintained by<br />
<a href="https://swiftspeed.app/link-diagnostic-and-insights-plugin/" rel="nofollow ugc">Swiftspeed</a></p>


Link Diagnostics – Broken Links, Redirects, and Link Insights

Complete link health monitoring for WordPress. Find broken links, fix redirect chains, optimize internal linking, and improve SEO performance.

Marco Beierer

<p>The <a href="https://www.marcobeierer.com/wordpress-plugins/link-checker" rel="nofollow ugc">Link Checker</a> for WordPress uses an external service to crawl your website and find broken links and images on your website.</p>
<p>In contrast to search engine tools like the Google Search Console, which only show if a URL on your website is not reachable, it does not matter for the Link Checker if the links leads to an internal or external URL. The Link Checker will find all dead links.</p>
<p>The Link Checker works for every plugin out of the box. The computation costs for your website is also very low because the crawler does the heavy work and just acts like a normal visitor, who visits all pages of you website once.</p>
<h4>Out of service</h4>
<p>It’s no longer possible to purchase tokens for the Link Checker as of mid-January 2023.</p>
<p>The service is still available for all users that have already purchased a token and will be shutdown when the last issued token expires mid-January 2024.</p>
<h4>Paid plugin</h4>
<p>Please note that the Link Checker requires a paid token to operate. The free version is no longer offered.</p>
<h4>Videos</h4>
<p>You can find videos about the Link Checker on the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rUFDp09tjs&list=PL5VYcNma6nfxIrlbpz0f1avXT_JIrUZA1" rel="nofollow ugc">Link Checker for WordPress playlist on YouTube</a>.</p>
<span class="embed-youtube" style="text-align:center; display: block;"><iframe loading="lazy" class="youtube-player" width="750" height="422" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8rUFDp09tjs?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&listType=playlist&list=PL5VYcNma6nfxIrlbpz0f1avXT_JIrUZA1" allowfullscreen="true" style="border:0;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox"></iframe></span>
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li><strong>Simple setup</strong>.</li>
<li><strong>Works out of the box</strong> with all WordPress plugins.</li>
<li><strong>Low computation costs</strong> for your webserver.</li>
<li>Lists all broken links and redirects on your website.</li>
<li>Support for Polylang (probably also WPML) sites.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Technical Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Respects your robots.txt file (also the crawl-delay directive).
<ul>
<li>You can use the user-agents MB-LinkChecker to control the crawler.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h4>Additional Features of the Professional Version</h4>
<ul>
<li>Check if embedded internal and external <strong>images</strong> are broken.</li>
<li>Check if embedded <strong>YouTube videos</strong> are broken.</li>
<li>Scheduler to <strong>automatically check a website</strong> once a day and get a summary report by email.</li>
<li>The result can be exported as CSV file.</li>
<li>Form login support to check protected pages like membership areas.</li>
<li>The result is saved on the Link Checker server so that it can be fetched multiple times without requiring a recheck. For example from different users or with different browsers.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Upcoming Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Support for checking the availability of videos, CSS files and JS files.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Technical Requirements</h4>
<ul>
<li>Works with <strong>PHP 5.6 and 7</strong>.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Is the service free of charge?</h4>
<p>The Link Checker Professional is a paid plugin. A free version was offered for many years, but since August 2022 only a paid version is available.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.marcobeierer.com/wordpress-plugins/link-checker-professional" rel="nofollow ugc">Link Checker Professional</a></p>
<h4>Use of an External Server</h4>
<p>The Link Checker uses an external server, operated by the developer of the plugin, to crawl your website and detect broken links. This means, that there is some communication between your website and the server. The only data that is communicated to the external server by your website is the URL of your website and the fact that you are using WordPress. The server than crawlers your website (as a normal visitor does) and answers with a list of the found broken links.</p>


Link Checker Professional

EDITED REVIEW: 2021.03.10 
The free plugin works, but stops before it can finish being useful. 500 links is simply not enough for a free version. It doesn't provide a free tier that's functional for most medium-sized websites. You end up having to buy it to actually use it. That makes this more of an advertisement than an actual plugin. I'm using a different plugin.

EDITED 2021.03.11
See my reply dated today.

	EDIT: The free plugin only checks 500 links. This is entirely useless, even for medium-sized sites.
	EDIT: Plugin registration consists of link allotments, with the minimum being 25K links checked in one go for ~50 Euros. It goes up drastically from there because Marco's server is the one doing the crawling.
	Most target websites are small, hosted on huge commercial properties optimized for WordPress. Additionally, crawling the local site may not be as optimal as scraping each post's content field for links and storing results locally.
	My server should be the one doing the work. If my server is doing the work, you can't expect me to pay by the link for a service my server is doing. Period.
	An example of a per unit subscription model that works is Mailchimp. Their servers are doing the work in a trusted secure environment so that my web host box doesn't become a shadow spambot. Offloading that service to mailchimp is not sketchy, and their terms are more than generous for small to mid-sized website admins, with a free tier that is actually commodious. That's not what's happening with this plugin.
	It checks every link on every page, even footer links that repeat across the entire site, so if you have a link like "theme created by...", that link counts on every page against your priced link count. Absurd.
	Worse, it counts a number of known valid links as broken.
	WordPress plugins in the .org library should offer a reasonable modicum of usefulness out of the gate. It should not seem hampered to the site admin. The pro version should offer additional capabilities that make the free plugin seem more complete. This plugin offers only a glimpse of what the paid plugin might do if you are willing to pay 45 euros minimum to check 25K links. You want to check more links? Buy more tokens.
	EDIT: Given the Author's (Marco Beierer) balanced response, I'll say this would better serve the WP community and Marco himself by:

 	scraping post content directly for links rather than crawling, 
	removing the tier caps -- including for the free version -- and then 
	Price the pro version between $50 and $100 for a single-tier paid version that also includes image and youtube link checking.
	Also for the pro version, add the ability to check all site menu links, sidebar/footer/widget links, post content for custom post-type links, custom field links, etc.

This would give the expected additional capability along with unrestricted link checking found in the free version.

A great plugin makes the free-plugin adopter feel like they're getting such a bargain they feel guilty for not supporting the plugin with either a donation or an upgrade to the pro version.

Bait and Switch - Pretty much forced to buy if you want to use.

An easy to use link checker for WordPress to detect broken links and images on your website.

Link Diagnostics – Broken Links, Redirects, and Link Insights vs Link Checker Professional