The maintenance-contract problem
Broken links are the maintenance item clients notice and agencies forget. A dead link on a client's pricing page is embarrassing precisely because it was nobody's job to look. Opening thirty sites a month to check is not a process; it is a hope.
The free Dragon Broken Links finds and fixes links on one site well (the workflow is in find and fix broken links). Dragon Broken Links Pro adds the parts that make it work across a portfolio: schedules, alerts, history and bulk operations.
Step 1: schedule the scan per site
On each site, under the Pro screen, set a scan schedule: hourly, twice daily, daily or weekly. The schedule also sets how often known links are re-checked. Daily suits most content sites; weekly is enough for brochure sites; hourly is for stores whose product links change constantly. Scans run in bounded batches on the site's own server, so a daily scan on a shared host is not a load problem.
Turn on deep scan where the site keeps links outside post content: custom fields from page builders and theme options, and comments if they are open. Which post types are scanned is set in the free plugin's Settings.
Step 2: route digests to one place
Set the alert destination on every site to the same channel: an agency inbox, or an HMAC-signed webhook that Slack and most automation tools accept. A digest arrives only when a scan finds links that are newly broken, so a quiet portfolio is a quiet channel. Verify the signature on the receiving side if you route through your own code; the secret is on the settings screen.
The result is a single feed: "Client A: 3 new broken links" at 7am, with the URLs and the posts they are in. Triage happens from the channel, and the fix happens on the site in a minute.
Step 3: fix in bulk when it is not one link
Two situations produce hundreds of broken links at once, and Pro handles both without clicking through rows:
- A domain changed, yours or a partner's. Domain find-and-replace rewrites every link to the old domain across the site, block-aware, with a revision per post.
- A scan turns up a pile of links to the same dead resource. Bulk fix and bulk dismiss act on a filtered set: edit them all, remove them all, or dismiss them all.
Step 4: report it
Two things make the monthly maintenance report credible: a trend and a list. Pro keeps a broken-over-time history for a year, so the report can show links found and fixed per month rather than a snapshot, and exports the current report as CSV for the client who wants the detail. A falling line on that chart is the maintenance contract earning its fee.
A portfolio routine that holds
- Daily: glance at the digest channel; fix anything on a page that matters the same day.
- Weekly: clear the Needs review bucket on sites that accumulated ambiguous responses (firewalled destinations, rate limits).
- Monthly: export the CSV, note the trend, include both in the client report.
- On any redesign or domain change: run the domain find-and-replace before the client's first visitor does.
Checklist
- Free and Pro active on every site under contract
- Scan schedule set to match each site's rate of change
- Deep scan on where links live in custom fields
- Digests from every site routed to one channel
- Monthly CSV and trend included in the maintenance report