About this plugin
Onsite Link Verdict checks the links and images in your posts, pages and comments and tells you which ones are dead. It knows the difference between “broken” and “I could not check it” This distinction is the whole reason this plugin exists. Plenty of servers refuse automated requests. Amazon answers 503 to bots. X answers 403 . LinkedIn answers 999 . A site behind a firewall throws a challenge page. None of those links are broken — they open perfectly well in your browser. Report them as broken and you hand the user a list of two hundred problems, of which one hundred and ninety are not problems, and they stop trusting the list. So Onsite Link Verdict only ever calls a link broken when it has proof: The destination server says the page is gone — 404 or 410 . And even then we ask a second time, with a different method, before accusing the link: there are servers that answer 404 to one kind of request and 200 to another, and a wrong accusation here is the most expensive kind. Or there is no server answering at all, three checks in a row — a domain that expired, a host that vanished. Everything else goes to a separate “Unverifiable” tab , with a plain-language note about what happened. If a server answered us — with 403 , 503 , a rate limit, a challenge page, anything that is not 404 or 410 — it answered, and that is not proof the page died. Your list of real problems stays short, and short means believable. It runs on your own server, and stays out of the way There is no account to create, no cloud service, no credit card, and none of your content is ever sent anywhere. Checking links is real work for the same server that answers your readers. Onsite Link Verdict is built around that: Nothing runs when a visitor loads a page. Checking happens on your site’s cron, never on the front end. At most 100 links per run, and never more than 45 seconds of wall clock , whichever comes first. Both are configurable; both are hard ceilings, not intentions. HEAD requests first, falling back to GET only when a verdict depends on it. At most 2 KB of any response body is ever read. The same URL repeated across fifty posts is fetched once , not fifty times. Measured: 90 links across 15 posts, pointing at 6 different addresses, cost 8 requests . A site that already told us it does not talk to robots is not asked again the next day. What you get Checks links and images, in posts, pages, custom post types and comments Sees inside page builders. On a page built with Elementor, Divi, SiteOrigin or Beaver, the content you see is not what is stored — and a checker that reads only the stored content finds nothing and tells you everything is fine. Onsite Link Verdict checks the page as a visitor sees it Four clear tabs: Broken, Warnings, Unverifiable, Good Plain-language explanation of the results that matter — not just a bare status code It knows your own site. A link to one of your pages that is still a draft, private or pending gives visitors a 404 — and instead of telling you the page no longer exists, Onsite Link Verdict tells you it exists and is not published, and which status it is in Automatic checks on your site’s cron, or start a full-site scan with one click. The scan itself is done in small slices and picks up where it left off, so it never has to finish inside a single request Progress you can actually see — “750 of 1,000 links checked (75%)”, with a rough time estimate, so you know it is working and not stuck Recheck any link on demand — it goes to the front of the queue and is checked on the next pass Entries disappear when the content does: remove a link from a post, trash the post, or delete a comment, and the entry leaves the list. The table does not grow forever Warns you if your site’s cron is disabled, so checks do not silently never run Clean uninstall — removes its table, options and scheduled events What it does not do Onsite Link Verdict finds broken links and tells you exactly which post, page or comment each one is in. It does not edit your content: you fix each link in the editor, where you can see it in context. That is deliberate. A plugin that rewrites your posts on its own is a plugin that will one day rewrite the wrong thing. Replacing one URL across an entire site in a single step is the obvious next thing to want. That is what Pro is for, below — and this plugin does not nag you about it. Onsite Link Verdict Pro (coming soon) Everything above is free, and stays free. Pro does the mechanical part, for people with more than a handful of links to fix: Replace a URL everywhere at once. You type the new address, you see a list of every place it will change with the text around it, and only then does anything happen. There is an undo, and the undo refuses to run if you edited the content afterwards. It will not touch what it cannot verify. If a link comes from a shortcode, a page builder or a theme filter, the address is not in the content we would be saving. Onsite Link Verdict says so and leaves it alone, instead of reporting success and changing nothing. Silence the domains that never answer bots. One pattern per line, and they stop appearing. Export any tab to CSV , in a form that opens correctly in Excel. Pro is not on sale yet. When it is, there will be a link in the plugin — and no email is collected in the meantime.