Rank Forge scans every post on your site for broken links — internal and external — in the background, via WP Cron, on a schedule you configure. When broken links are found, you get an email notification and a dashboard widget showing the count. Each broken link has edit controls to fix it in place.
Broken outbound links leak PageRank, frustrate users, and signal to Google that your content isn’t maintained. Broken internal links are even worse — they create orphan pages, break navigation paths, and damage the internal linking structure that Google uses to understand your site’s hierarchy.
On a mature WordPress site with thousands of posts, broken links accumulate whether you notice them or not. External sites delete pages. Internal pages get renamed or moved. Every one is a potential SEO problem.
Rank Forge finds them all.
Instead of scanning every link on every page load (which would slow down your site), Rank Forge runs the broken link checker as a background job via WP Cron. You configure the interval:
The scan runs without UI interaction. You see results in the admin when you next log in.
Every <a href> pointing to a URL on your own domain. If the target is a WordPress post, page, or custom post type, Rank Forge verifies it exists and is published. If it’s a direct URL, Rank Forge makes an HTTP HEAD request to check the status.
Every <a href> pointing to another domain. Rank Forge makes an HTTP HEAD request (with a browser-like user agent) and records the response code.
Every <img src> on every page is checked. Broken image sources are flagged separately from text link errors.
File downloads linked from content (PDFs, ZIPs, etc.) are checked for availability.
Links that redirect through multiple hops are flagged (chained redirects) — these aren’t “broken” but they’re suboptimal for SEO.
Each failure type is tagged separately so you can filter (e.g., “show me only 404s” or “show me only DNS failures”).
Broken link results are cached with a configurable TTL (default: 30 days for working links, 7 days for broken links). Working links aren’t re-checked until the cache expires, which keeps scan times fast even on huge sites.
You can force a full re-scan from the dashboard if you suspect cached results are stale.
Once the scan completes, broken links appear in a table with:
<a> tag, keeps the anchor text)Configure email notifications in settings:
Recipients can be multiple addresses (admin, SEO lead, content editor).
When a broken internal link is found, Rank Forge offers a one-click path to create a redirect for it. This is especially useful after migrations or URL restructures where the same internal link appears on many pages.
The broken link checker is designed not to slow down your site. It:
A site with 10,000 posts can be scanned fully in under 30 minutes of cumulative WP Cron runtime.
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The Broken Link Checker is included in every paid plan.
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