Why broken links matter more than they look
A dead link is a small failure that compounds. Visitors hit a 404 and leave. Search engines spend crawl budget on pages that do not exist and pass less value through the pages that do. Images that have gone missing from the uploads folder leave holes in layouts nobody notices until a client does. And on a site that has been through a redesign or a domain change, there are usually far more of them than anyone expects.
The fix is not glamorous: find them all, decide which ones matter, repair them without breaking the content around them, and set something up so the next batch does not go unnoticed for a year.
The four kinds of broken link
- Internal links to content that no longer exists: a post trashed, a page unpublished, a slug renamed without a redirect.
- External links to pages that have gone: the other site restructured, changed domain, or shut down.
- Missing images and media: the post references an upload that was deleted, or was never copied across in a migration.
- Embeds and iframes whose source has vanished: an old video, a retired widget.
Most link checkers treat these the same way, by requesting every URL over HTTP. That is slow, it hammers your own server for internal links, and it is wrong for the first kind: a draft or a trashed post answers 404 to a checker but is not "broken" in any sense a site owner cares about.
Finding them
Install Dragon Broken Links, open Tools, then Broken Links, and press Scan now. The scan reads every link, image, iframe and media source in your published content, including WooCommerce products, custom post types and synced patterns, dedupes them so each unique URL is checked once, and then checks them in bounded batches with live progress.
Two things make the results trustworthy:
- Internal links are resolved against your database, not fetched. A link to trashed, draft, deleted or renamed content is flagged instantly, with the reason; an image missing from the uploads folder is caught by looking for the file. Your server is never asked to fetch its own pages.
- External links are checked politely and classified into three buckets rather than one.
If your site is large or gets little traffic, the WP-CLI command wp dragon-broken-links scan runs a full scan to completion from the terminal.
Google Search Console's Pages report is a useful second source for internal 404s that other sites link to, which a content scan cannot see. Those belong in the redirect step below.
Triage: Broken, Suspected, Needs review
Not every failed request is a broken link, and a checker that says otherwise trains you to ignore it. The report separates:
- Broken: a hard failure (404, 410, dead domain, connection refused) confirmed on three separate checks. Fix these.
- Suspected: a hard failure seen once. It will be re-checked before it counts; usually it either confirms or clears itself.
- Needs review: an ambiguous answer such as a 403 from a firewall, a 429 rate limit, a timeout or a server error. These are often working sites that block automated requests. Open a couple in a browser; if they load, Dismiss everywhere and move on.
Every row shows the reason in plain English and which posts contain the link.
Fixing them without breaking anything
From the report, each link offers:
- Edit URL: change the link in every post it appears in. The fix is block-editor aware: the block's data and its rendered HTML are updated together, escaping is preserved, and a revision is created, so the editor never reports invalid content and you can undo.
- Remove link: unlink the text but keep it, or keep the image for an image link. Right for a dead external reference that has no replacement.
- Re-check: for the link you just fixed on the other end.
- Create redirect: for a broken internal URL, when Dragon Redirect Manager is active, turn the old address into a 301 to a new one in one click. Choose this over editing when other sites may link to the old URL too.
When to redirect and when to edit: edit the link if the only references are your own; redirect if the old URL may exist anywhere else (other sites, search results, printed material, old newsletters). Often you do both.
For a site that changed domain and has hundreds of links still pointing at the old one, Dragon Broken Links Pro adds site-wide domain find-and-replace and bulk fixing so it is one operation rather than hundreds.
Stopping the next batch
- Background re-checks. After the first scan, every link is re-checked on a cadence you choose (weekly by default) in short background runs, and a post is re-scanned whenever it is saved. New breakages surface on their own.
- Slug-change redirects. Dragon Redirect Manager automatically creates a redirect whenever a post or page slug changes, which removes the most common cause of internal 404s at source.
- A 404 monitor. Redirect Manager's 404 inbox groups real visitor 404s by URL, scores out bot noise, and lets you create a redirect from any of them. That catches inbound broken links from other sites, which a content scan cannot. The full launch-day version of that workflow is in fixing 404s after a redesign.
- Alerts. Dragon Broken Links Pro emails you, or posts to Slack or a webhook, when a link newly turns Broken, so the report does not need remembering.
Coming from another link checker
If the site previously ran Broken Link Checker, the Settings tab imports your dismissed links so you do not triage the same "Needs review" list twice. Nothing is removed from the other plugin. For a wider comparison, see Broken Link Checker alternatives.