A Free Broken Link Checker for WordPress (Built Into Your SEO Plugin)
Broken links accumulate quietly. You delete an old post that three other articles were linking to. You restructure a category and forget to update the internal links pointing at the old URL. None of this happens on purpose — it’s just what happens to any site that’s been actively maintained and edited over time.
Why broken internal links are worth fixing
There are two separate costs here. The visitor-facing one is obvious: someone clicks a link expecting content and lands on a dead page instead, which is a bad experience and can quietly erode trust in the rest of the site.
The less obvious cost is about link equity. Internal linking is one of the ways authority flows around your site — a well-linked cornerstone page passes some of its ranking strength to the pages it links to. A broken link isn’t passing anything anywhere. It’s authority pointed at a dead end.
Why a dedicated broken-link-checker plugin isn’t always the answer
There are standalone plugins built entirely around link checking, and some of them work fine. But running an extra plugin just for this means another moving part on your site, another thing that needs maintenance, and in some cases, a background process that continuously crawls your own site and can add real load, especially on larger sites.
How Sanctuary Tiger SEO handles this instead
The free plugin includes a broken link scanner as one feature among the rest of its SEO toolkit — not a separate install, not a separate background service. It checks your site for broken internal links so you can find and fix them without needing another plugin doing the same basic job on top of everything else already running.
This pairs naturally with the plugin’s redirect manager: once a broken link is found, if the content genuinely moved rather than disappeared, a 301 redirect from the old URL closes the loop properly — updating the destination is only half the fix if the old URL isn’t also pointed somewhere useful for anyone still arriving at it from outside your own internal links.
What this doesn’t cover
To be precise about scope: this checks internal links — links within your own content pointing to your own pages. It doesn’t monitor external links you’ve placed pointing to other websites (those can break too, when the destination site changes or disappears, which is a separate maintenance concern worth checking periodically by hand or with a different tool).
The takeaway
Broken links aren’t a one-time cleanup project — they’re an ongoing byproduct of actively editing a site. Having the check built into the same plugin already handling your titles, schema, and redirects means one less thing running in the background, and one less reason to postpone fixing what it finds.
