How to Find and Remove Broken Internal Links in WordPress (Bulk Fix)
Broken internal links frustrate readers and waste Google’s crawl of your site. After a big content cleanup, when we deleted or merged hundreds of old posts, our blog was left with hundreds of links pointing to pages that no longer existed. Here’s how to find and remove broken internal links in WordPress quickly, in bulk, and keep them from coming back.
Quick answer: Install the free Broken Link Checker plugin and let it scan your site. Filter the results to Broken links containing your own domain, select them all, and use the bulk action Unlink (or edit each link to point to a working page). Then check Google Search Console for any 404s it still finds.
Table of Contents
Why broken internal links hurt your site
- Bad user experience: readers who click a link and land on a 404 page often leave.
- Wasted crawling: Googlebot follows internal links to discover and re-crawl pages. Dead ends waste that effort.
- Lost link value: internal links pass authority between your posts. A broken link passes nothing.
Every SEO audit tool flags broken links as a priority issue. They pile up quickly if you’ve done a site audit and deleted thin posts, creating lots of 404 pages.
How to find broken internal links in WordPress
The Broken Link Checker plugin by WPMU DEV is still the easiest way to find broken links on WordPress blogs. Newer versions use a cloud scanning engine, which checks your site from WPMU DEV’s servers so it doesn’t slow down your hosting. It needs a free WPMU DEV account. The original “local” engine is still available if you prefer to run it on your own server.
- Install and activate Broken Link Checker from Plugins > Add New.
- Run a scan and wait for it to finish. Large sites can take a while.
- Open the list of broken links, and search for your own domain name with the link status set to Broken. This shows only broken internal links.
In our case, the search instantly listed hundreds of broken internal links.
How to remove broken internal links in bulk
Select some or all of the broken links with the checkbox at the top of the list, then choose a bulk action:
- Unlink: removes the link but keeps the anchor text, so your sentences still read normally. This fixed hundreds of links for us in seconds.
- Edit URL: change a link to a working page, such as a newer post on the same topic. This is better than unlinking when a good replacement exists.
- Not broken / Dismiss: for false alarms, such as a site that blocks link checkers.
You can also fix links one at a time, or open the post to check the context and choose the best replacement.
Redirect instead of unlinking
If a deleted post has a close replacement, add a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. That fixes every internal link and any backlinks from other sites at once. Rank Math (Rank Math > Redirections) and the free Redirection plugin both make this easy. For pages that are gone for good, a 410 Gone status tells Google to drop them faster.
Other free tools to find broken links
- Google Search Console: the Pages report lists URLs returning Not found (404), and shows which pages link to them.
- Ahrefs Webmaster Tools: a free site audit that flags broken internal links. Our guide to the free Ahrefs account shows how to set it up.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: a desktop crawler, free for up to 500 URLs.
Keep broken links from coming back
- Before deleting a post, search your site for links to it and update them, or add a redirect.
- Never change a post’s permalink without adding a redirect.
- Run a broken link scan every month or two, or after any big cleanup.
Frequently asked questions
Does Broken Link Checker slow down WordPress?
The cloud engine scans from WPMU DEV’s servers, so it doesn’t load your hosting. The local engine can be heavy on large sites, so limit how often it runs or deactivate it after cleaning up.
Should I unlink or redirect broken links?
Redirect when a close replacement page exists. Unlink when there’s no good replacement, so readers aren’t sent to an unrelated page.
Do broken internal links hurt SEO?
A few won’t cause a penalty, but many broken links waste crawl budget, lose internal link value and annoy visitors. It’s worth fixing them.
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The broken link checker WordPress plugin is a useful plugin that helps to detect broken links on your site without overloading your server as it checks thousands of web pages for links inside your site content.