Wendy Cholbi

Technology-to-English Translator

WordPress Plugin: Broken Link Checker

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Broken Link Checker is a tremendously useful plugin, one that I include with all my WordPress installs. It does exactly what its name suggests: Checks your blog posts and pages for broken links (automatically, in the background) and lets you fix them easily, without having to visit and edit each individual post.

How to install and configure Broken Link Checker

You’ll want to install this WordPress plugin in the usual way. And this is one of those plugins that works great with the default configuration. Just activate it and let it do its magic!

Now that it’s installed, here’s how to use it to find and fix those pesky broken links.

You can access this plugin in two ways: In the sidebar of your WordPress Dashboard, visit Settings –> Link Checker or visit Tools –> Broken Links.

Settings --> Link Checker in the WordPress sidebar

Tools --> Broken Links in the WordPress sidebar

Visiting and changing the plugin settings

When you visit Settings –> Link Checker, you’ll see a screen that displays the number of broken links at the top, along with a button labeled “re-check all pages.” Clicking this button will, you guessed it, re-check all the links on your site. It may take some time if you have a lot of posts or pages, but it can be really useful if you’ve just done some site overhauling.

Broken Link Checker settings page, showing number of broken links at the top

Even if you don’t use the “re-check all pages” button, Broken Link Checker will be working in the background, checking all your links at the interval specified in the “Check each link” field. The default is every 72 hours.

Also on this settings page is something called “Broken link CSS.” If the checkbox is checked, the default setting is for broken links to be marked with a strikethrough. You could change this to any style you want, but the important thing to remember is that anyone viewing your site will see broken links marked this way. If you don’t want to visually call out the fact that your links are broken, just uncheck the box.

Personally I think you’re better off catching and fixing those links than visually marking them for all to see. Which you can also do quite easily with this plugin. Read on to find out how.

Finding and fixing broken links

If you click the “found (number) broken links” link on the settings page, OR if you visit Tools –> Broken Links, you’ll be presented with a handy list of all your broken links, showing the page or post title, the link (anchor) text, and the non-working URL, as shown here:

Detail of Broken Links page

In this example, I have a link to a post on my own blog that’s not working (oops, I probably changed the permalink), a link to an external site that’s not working, and a link to an image on one of my blog posts that’s not working (probably left over from when I was hosting my images somewhere else in my hosting system).

Fortunately, these are pretty easy to fix. I can find the updated URL of my own post and the blog image. If the external site has changed, I can use a new one…or simply make the text no longer be a link. I can even tell the plugin to stop telling me a certain link is broken if I don’t want it to show up in my broken link list anymore.

Just hover your cursor over the link in question, and several options appear below the post title and link URL:

Both post-editing and link-editing options appear when you hover your cursor over one of the broken links

The three options underneath the post/page title are:

  • Edit, which opens the post editing screen so you can manually change the text and/or link
  • Delete, which deletes the post (click with caution!)
  • View, which shows you how this post looks to a blog visitor

However, it’s often quicker and simpler to edit the link directly, right within this plugin screen. To do that, choose one of the four options that appear underneath the URL:

  • Details, which shows you a log of how many times the link has failed, if there was an error code generated, etc. You probably won’t need to click on this unless you like reading error logs (hahahaha!)
  • Unlink, which simply makes the text (or image) no longer a link. Very useful and simple solution. Just don’t use for text like “click here” or buttons, because inviting people to click on something unclickable ends up confusing them.
  • Exclude, which tells the link checker to stop reporting instances of this link as broken. In my example, links to photobucket.com kept coming up as broken, despite the fact that I could visit the site just fine. So I ended up excluding them.
  • Edit URL, which lets you directly edit the web address the link is pointing to without visiting the Edit Post screen. If the page in question has a new address, you can paste it here. Just remember to click “Save URL” after you’ve made changes in the URL field.

You’ll probably end up using Unlink and Edit URL the most. They’re super-useful.

Once you’ve made a change that fixes the broken link, it will blink a soothing green-is-for-go color and disappear from this page. Nice job! If you fix a link and the link checker doesn’t seem to “get” it, you can wait awhile, force a recheck, or click “Exclude” to give yourself a clean slate.

And that’s it! Useful, quick, and really easy to use, Broken Link Checker is a must-have plugin for WordPress sites of all sizes.

Here’s the plugin creator’s Broken Link Checker page, and a description of an upcoming version (0.9), and the author’s discussion of a user survey, including descriptions of some planned features.

How to forward one domain to another using GoDaddy

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I recently received this question via email:

“I bought two domain names, and I want both of them to point to the same place (I want to use one of them, and have anyone who visits the second one automatically go to the first one). How do I do this?”

Turns out, I needed to do this anyway for a handful of domain names I bought for the new WordPress class I’m teaching with my friend, energy healer and Project Nanny extraordinaire Meredith Curtin. So while I was busy forwarding domains, I snapped a couple of screenshots to illustrate how easy it is to change this setting from inside your GoDaddy account.

This trick is also useful if you’ve bought both the .com and .net versions of your domain name, or if your nonprofit uses a .org address but you also want people who type the .com address to end up at the right place. I always recommend buying more than one domain.

Forwarding a domain with GoDaddy is a simple 3-step process. Ready? Here we go:

1. Log into your GoDaddy account.

You’ll see a screen that includes a list of your domain names (or the first five, if you own more than five).

"My Account" screen, shown when you first log into GoDaddy.com

"My Account" screen, shown when you first log into GoDaddy.com

 

2. Click on “Advanced Details” for the domain you want to forward.

You’ll see a screen that’s chock-full of settings to change. Don’t be intimidated by this. All you need to do is make one small change!

Look for the arrow-shaped icon that’s labeled “Forward.” Give it a click.

Look for the "forwarding" icon on the Domain Manager screen

Look for the "forwarding" icon on the Domain Manager screen

 

3. In the popup window, fill in the web address of the site where you want your visitors to end up.

In the example shown here, I’m making sure that anyone who types www.thegentleartofmakingmoney.com gets automatically sent to the real class address, which is www.gentleartofmakingmoney.com.

Now, if I refer to the class verbally as “The Gentle Art of Making Money” and someone types the whole name, including the “the,” they’ll get to our main class page, because both addresses now point to the same place (try clicking the links in the above paragraph; they really do end up at the same place, with a barely noticeable time lag for the first one).

Click OK to save the changes (you can always edit or remove your forwarding later).

There you go! You have successfully forwarded your domain name to a different address.

Semi-Interesting Note: You can type any web address here. It can be a domain name that you also own (as shown in this example), but you don’t have to own it. The address you type can be someone else’s website, or even a page at Amazon.com. GoDaddy really doesn’t care where you’re sending people.

Just type the name of the domain where you want your site visitors to end up, and click "OK."

Just type the name of the domain where you want your site visitors to end up, and click "OK."

 

4. Bonus Tip: How to forward multiple domain names at once

If you have bought several domain names that you want to forward, you can also batch-forward them to avoid repeating these steps individually for each domain name. To do this, you want to go to your Domain Manager where you can see a list of all your domains:

Batch-forward multiple domains by checking multiple boxes before clicking the green "Forward" arrow.

Batch-forward multiple domains by clicking multiple checkboxes before clicking the green "Forward" arrow.

 

You’ll want to click the checkboxes next to all the domains you want to forward (you must be forwarding them all to the same destination address).

Then, and only then, click the familiar green “Forward” arrow at the top of the screen. You’ll see a popup window similar to the one shown in Step 3, except that it will indicate that you’re forwarding more than one domain. There’s still only one place to fill the destination, however.

Got any domain-forwarding questions? Leave me a comment and let’s talk!

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Why it’s OK to get naked on the internet

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Here’s one from the mailbag:

What’s the deal with the “www” in a web address? Sometimes I see a link that looks like https://www.wendycholbi.com/ and other times I see links that look like https://www.wendycholbi.com/. What’s the difference? Are these always the same thing? Why do some sites include it and some leave it out? Can I leave out the w’s when I’m typing a web address?

OK, great topic! Let’s start by breaking this this nebulous area of confusion down into some specific questions:

What does the “www” mean?

The simple answer is that it stands for “world wide web.” In the Internet’s olden days, “Web” wasn’t synonymous with “Internet” (technically, it still isn’t, but these days the terms are used so interchangeably that it would be futile to protest). There were other ways of using the Internet: Email, file transfer (FTP), usenet, and more. So the “www” simply meant that the address pointed to a website and not some other type of Internet resource.

What do you call the “www” part of a web address?

A domain name comes in the form yourdomain.com (or yourdomain.org, or yourdomain.name, or many other variations). WendyCholbi.com and ebay.com are both domain names, for instance.

Anything before the domain name, separated with a dot, is called a subdomain. So the “www” in www.WendyCholbi.com is a subdomain. The “tickets” in tickets.ebay.com is a subdomain. If you have a blog on Blogger.com and you have an address like yourdomain.blogspot.com, the “yourdomain” part is a subdomain.

A domain name without any subdomains is called a naked domain (ooh, racy, am I right?)

Those of you using Blogger may be interested to know that the prudes folks who run Blogger won’t let you use a naked domain to host your blog. Yes, you can use your own domain name, but it has to be non-naked (it must have a subdomain, whether it’s “www” or something else). This leads to a complication when using your own domain name with Blogger: You have to figure out a way to point the naked domain to your “www” subdomain. The easiest way to do this is to forward the naked domain to the “www” subdomain (here are instructions for doing it with a GoDaddy account).

Why do some sites have a “www” and some leave it out?

Now that we’ve left the olden days behind, the vast majority of URLs do point to websites, whether or not they contain a “www.” That subdomain became ubiquitous and therefore nearly meaningless. Although “www” is still probably the most common subdomain, and many websites still use it, it’s becoming more and more common to just drop it entirely.

Yes, that’s right: More and more website owners are getting naked with their domain names. Rowr!

So it’s merely a choice made by the site owner, whether to use the “www” subdomain or get naked.

Are “www.yourdomain.com” and “yourdomain.com” always the same thing? Can I safely leave out the www when typing a web address?

I would love to give you a simple answer to this question, but because it’s up to the individual website owner whether to include “www” or not, different websites are going to act differently. Usually, the www-containing version and the naked version of a domain point to the same page, but sometimes they don’t.

The simplest rule of thumb I can give is that if a naked version of the domain doesn’t work, just try typing “www” before the naked domain and that should probably work.

Bonus question that wasn’t asked, but I’ll answer it anyway: If I’m a website owner, should I use “www” or not?

Definitely go naked!

Let me clarify:

  • As a site owner, you should always make sure that people can get to your site whether they type the “www” or not. This means pointing the “www” subdomain and your naked domain to the same place. Most web hosts have a setting that lets you do this with a few clicks.
  • But when you mention your site (in conversation, when linking to it, in your advertising, on your business cards, etc.) just drop the w’s. They’re cumbersome to pronounce, they take up space, and the “.com” (or “.org” or whatever) is enough to identify your web address as a web address.

Whew, that’s enough nakedness for today, thankyouverymuch! Stay tuned for more questions by subscribing to the blog, and feel free to send me your own question. You might get featured here!

–Wendy Cholbi, your friendly neighborhood swim-goggle-wearing technology-to-English translator