Description
Find every broken or redirecting internal link in your WordPress content, and fix them in bulk.
VLink Broken Links Scout reads your content straight from the database, so the front-end never gets crawled and visitors are never slowed down. Every fix is preceded by a one-click-restorable snapshot, so you can replace links across hundreds of posts without fearing a typo.
How it works
- Scan your content for internal links.
- Check each URL with a real HTTP request and classify the response.
- Fix broken URLs and permanent redirects (301 / 308) one at a time or in bulk.
What gets flagged
- Broken: 404 Not Found, 410 Gone.
- Safe to auto-replace: 301 Moved Permanently, 308 Permanent Redirect.
- Informational only: 302 / 303 / 307 (the original URL is still authoritative, so the plugin will not auto-replace them).
How you fix things
- One link at a time: open the Change Link modal, see the suggested target, replace across every post that uses it.
- In bulk: filter by status, preview the diff, then apply.
- Always reversible: every fix creates a snapshot you can restore in one click.
- Audit trail: every change is logged with old URL, new URL, posts touched, user, and timestamp.
Built for safety
- Snapshot before every change. Restore is one click away.
- Background work runs in small bounded batches with retry on timeout, so visitor requests are never blocked.
- Optional scheduled scan with a clean HTML email summary.
- RFC 3986 and RFC 9110 compliant URL handling, so http vs https, www vs non-www, and trailing slash variants are all matched correctly.
Privacy
The plugin does not collect, store, or transmit personal data about visitors or administrators. No third-party API calls. No telemetry. No analytics. No call-home.
The only outbound traffic is HTTP requests to the URLs already present in your own content, in order to read their response codes. No cookies, no Referer header, and no request body are sent.
The optional scheduled-scan email report sends a plain summary to the WordPress admin address you configure; nothing leaves your server otherwise.
Screenshots
post_content so any change can be reverted with one click.Installation
- Open Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin in your WordPress admin, choose the zip, and Activate. (Or drop the
vlink-broken-links-scoutfolder intowp-content/plugins/.) - Open VLink Links Scout from the WordPress admin menu.
- On the Overview tab, click Run scan to collect every internal URL from your content.
- Click Check all links to fetch the HTTP status for each unique URL.
- Open the Links tab to fix items one by one, or use the Bulk Update wizard for batches.
FAQ
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Will this plugin slow my site down?
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No. Every long-running operation runs in the background through AJAX or WP-Cron. No plugin code executes during a visitor request.
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Does it work with custom post types?
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Yes. Open VLink Links Scout → Settings and tick the post types you want included.
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What if I replace a link by mistake?
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You can undo it. Every fix, single or bulk, creates a snapshot of the affected content before the replacement. Open the Backups tab and click Restore on the session you want to roll back.
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Why are 302 and 307 redirects not auto-fixed?
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Because RFC 9110 defines them as temporary redirects: the original URL is still the canonical destination. The plugin shows them as informational only. You can replace them manually if you know they have become permanent.
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Where is plugin data stored?
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In three dedicated tables inside your own WordPress database. By default these are removed when you uninstall the plugin. If you want them to persist across a delete + reinstall, turn on Keep my data when the plugin is deleted in Settings → Data retention.
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Does the plugin call any external service?
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No. The only outbound traffic is HTTP requests to the URLs already inside your own content, in order to read their response codes. No telemetry, no analytics, no call-home.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“VLink Broken Links Scout” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “VLink Broken Links Scout” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.17.3
Critical fix. The Change Link replacement could leave a stray slash behind when the source URL contained accidental double slashes (example.com//path//), producing malformed links like example.com/path///. It could also rewrite the wrong URL when the source was a prefix of a longer child link (replacing example.com/blog would corrupt example.com/blog/article). Replacement is now URL-boundary aware and consumes any trailing slashes cleanly.
Step 2 is faster: per-round batch raised to 4 URLs and per-URL timeout lowered to 6 seconds, so a 1000-link scan finishes in roughly half the time on most hosts.
The Change Link modal now shows the full variant list by default, so you can see exactly which forms of the URL will be touched before clicking Replace.
After a Replace, the new URL is re-checked immediately so the row in the Links table shows its real status instead of staying as “Unchecked”.
1.17.2
Step 2 (Check links) responsiveness pass: each round of the link check now finishes faster and the status line shows live elapsed seconds, so slow batches no longer read as frozen. Foundation Audit redirect-chain detection fixed: redirect counts are now tracked correctly. No schema change.
1.17.0 – 1.17.1
New Foundation Audit tab: an in-dashboard technical SEO audit that categorises issues into five priority buckets (Index, Crawl, Redirect, Canonical, Duplicate). Hardened against oversized response bodies and pathological HTML.
1.16.x
Re-check button now always shows a clear status pulse and toast. Bulk Update wizard spans the full dashboard width. Plugin Check (PCP) compliance pass.
1.16.0
History tab gains drill-down detail: click the Posts count to expand an inline list of the posts touched, with anchor text parsed from the backup snapshot. Each row links straight to Edit post or Change URL again.
1.15.x
Dashboard rebuild on a light surface: four summary cards (Unchecked, Passed, Warnings, Failed) with click-through into the Links tab pre-filtered. Refresh and Export CSV controls in the top bar. Roadmap tab.
1.13.0 – 1.14.0
Full-screen Bulk Fix Progress modal: replacement one link at a time with FROM and TO diff, source post and anchor text visible, instant Cancel, and fail-fast after three consecutive timeouts. Mark-safe and Ignore batches fan out concurrently.
1.12.0 – 1.12.7
Returned to zero third-party API calls. Change-link modal gains a pre-flight preview block (posts affected + variant list). SQL hardening pass.
1.10.0 – 1.11.x
External link checking, comment-content scanning, auto-fix permanent redirects after scheduled scans, REST endpoints, and a UX polish pass (toasts, focus traps, empty states).
1.0.0 – 1.9.x
Initial public release: RFC 3986 URI normalisation, RFC 9110 redirect classification, automatic snapshot before every fix, audit history, ignore patterns, CSV export.