Broken links can lead visitors to missing pages, create a poor browsing experience, and negatively affect search engine visibility. Siteligent's Broken Link Checker scans your website's published content and helps you identify links that no longer work.
How the Broken Link Checker Works
Siteligent is designed to perform link checking without putting unnecessary load on your WordPress server.
Instead of making your WordPress server perform hundreds or thousands of external HTTP requests, the process is divided between the Connector and Siteligent's cloud infrastructure.
1. Discover Your Website's Pages
The Siteligent Connector uses lightweight database queries to build an inventory of your site's published URLs and public posts. This provides Siteligent with the pages and content that need to be checked without requiring a resource-intensive crawl directly from your WordPress server.
2. Detect Your XML Sitemap
The Connector also looks for active XML sitemaps on your website.
It can identify sitemaps generated by common SEO solutions, including:
Yoast SEO
Rank Math
SEOPress
All in One SEO (AIOSEO)
WordPress's native sitemap
This helps Siteligent discover URLs that should be included in the scan.
3. Check Links from the Cloud
Once the URLs have been discovered, Siteligent's cloud-based crawler performs the link checks asynchronously from its own infrastructure. This means the crawling work isn't performed directly by your WordPress hosting server. As a result, the CPU and memory resources of your WordPress server aren't consumed by a large number of link-checking requests.
Identify Where a Broken Link Appears
Finding a broken URL is only part of the problem. You also need to know which page or post contains it.
When the cloud crawler identifies a broken link, for example, a 404 Not Found or 500 Server Error, Siteligent sends the URL back to your WordPress site's Connector. The Connector then resolves the URL against your site's content and identifies the original post or page containing the broken link.
Siteligent can then show you the source content along with a direct edit link, making it easier to go straight to the content that needs to be corrected.
Common Broken Link Errors
The checker can identify links that return error responses such as:
404 - Page Not Found
500 - Server Error
A broken link may occur because a page was deleted, a URL was changed, an external website removed a resource, or a link was entered incorrectly.
Once you've identified the source page, you can either update the link or redirect the old URL when appropriate.
Manage Redirects from Siteligent
Siteligent also includes a Redirects Manager through the Siteligent Connector.
This allows you to create redirects without needing to manually modify server configuration files.
Redirect Table: The Connector creates a dedicated database table named:
wp_siteligent_redirects. This table stores the redirects managed through Siteligent.
Exact URL Redirects: For straightforward URL changes, you can create a standard redirect from one URL to another. For example:
/old-page/→/new-page/. This is useful when a page has permanently moved and you want visitors using the old URL to reach the new location.
Regex Redirects: The Redirects Manager also supports regular expression (Regex) matching for more advanced redirect patterns. This can be useful when you need to redirect groups of URLs rather than creating an individual redirect for every URL. Siteligent applies validation to these patterns to help prevent invalid redirect configurations.
Redirects Are Applied Early
The redirect engine runs during WordPress's early template_redirect stage.
This allows redirects to be processed before WordPress loads the page template, keeping the redirect process lightweight and avoiding unnecessary page processing.
Built-In Lockout Protection
The Redirects Manager protects several system-critical WordPress paths from redirects.
Redirect rules will not be applied to:
/wp-admin/wp-login.php/wp-json/xmlrpc.php/wp-cron.php/siteligent
This prevents an incorrectly configured redirect from accidentally blocking access to WordPress administration, authentication, API endpoints, scheduled tasks, or the Siteligent Connector itself.
Fix a Broken Link
When you find a broken link, choose the appropriate fix:
If the destination still exists: Update the link to point to the correct URL.
If the page has permanently moved: Create a redirect from the old URL to the new location.
If the content no longer exists: Remove or replace the link with a relevant destination.
After making the change, run another check to confirm that the broken link has been resolved.
A Practical Workflow
A simple workflow for maintaining healthy links is:
Run the Broken Link Checker.
Review the URLs returning errors.
Identify the post or page containing each broken link.
Open the source content using the direct edit link.
Update or remove the incorrect link.
If the URL has permanently moved, create a redirect using the Redirects Manager.
Run another scan to confirm the issue has been resolved.