Links on websites that operate with the WordPress or other content management system are one of the most important and common elements that make up web pages. All pages on any website include links that take the user or visitor to another place when they click on them. Links are also among the most common. Elements that visitors interact with while spending time browsing a website.
Therefore, it is important to pay special attention to the links on the site and keep them working well to the maximum extent possible by checking them periodically and repairing them. Therefore, in this article, we will highlight the topic of links on websites and their importance, and then we will explain how to check and repair them on WordPress sites.
The concept of links in websites
A link or hyperlink in websites is defined as an element that users can interact with by clicking on it to take them to another web page or to another place within the same page or to start the process of downloading a file or something else, and it can be represented by a phrase or A button or even an image on the front end of the site.
Basically, it can be said that the link consists of two parts, the first of which is the part that appears to the visitor on the front end of the site, and the second is the address (URL) related to the page or content to which the link directs users, which can appear at the bottom of the browser window when the mouse cursor is placed on it. Link.
Most links on the front end of the site are distinguished by showing them in a color different from the color of the regular text, and this color usually expresses the site’s visual identity. If the primary color in the site’s visual identity is purple, the link color is also purple.
Types of links in websites
There are two types of links your website can include: internal links and external links. These two types are not technically different, as they both direct the user elsewhere, but they differ in the domain to which the URL of the page to which the visitor is taken belongs. There is also a third type of link called backlinks, but these links are not located within your site itself. The list explains the concept of the three types of links:
- Internal links: They take the user to a web page affiliated with the same website on which the link is located, and the domain name in the URL of the link is the same as the domain name in the URL of the web page on which the link is located.
- External links: They take the user to a web page that belongs to another website that is different from the site on which the link is located, and the domain name in the URL of the link is different from the domain name that is in the URL of the web page on which the link is located.
- Backlinks: These are links that lead to one of your site pages from other sites, that is, they are the same as external links. For example, if your site includes an external link to another site, this external link is a backlink to that site.
All of the above types of links are important, and it is necessary to pay attention to them in order to improve various aspects of the website, including the user experience , the position of the site pages in search results , and so on.
The importance of links on the website
Inserting high-quality internal and external links in a decent and appropriate manner on the site’s pages and making sure to keep them working properly is very important because it provides many advantages and benefits that raise the quality of the site, including but not limited to:
- Internal links help keep users on your site longer and make it easier for search engines to crawl their pages, which leads to your site content being indexed and shown in search results.
- Well-added links make the user experience better by facilitating and accelerating his access to his goal. For example, if you are talking in an article about the best ways to profit from the Internet, the visitor will often want to see a detailed explanation of one of the methods that he likes, and therefore if you I have placed a link to an article explaining this method that he can click on to get to what he wants quickly and easily.
- Links help make your content reliable. When you cite a study to support your idea and mention its source by including its link in the article, the content of the article becomes of higher quality, and visitors’ confidence in it increases, which contributes to making visitors loyal, and indirectly increases their number.
- Backlinks are an important factor in ranking search results , as the ranking of your site’s pages increases in the results pages the more high-quality backlinks that lead to them. Backlinks also direct visitors from other sites to your site, which gives you more visitors .
There are also many other benefits that different types of links can provide to websites, and in order to ensure that you obtain these benefits, and to avoid that the links cause harm to your site instead of benefit, you must examine them to ensure that they work correctly and do not harm the user experience. .
How to check and fix links in WordPress
In order for 404 error messages and others not to appear to visitors and negatively impact their experience on the website, and in order to maintain the site’s ranking high in search results, you must periodically (every week or month) check and repair the internal and external links on your site, and the links Background found on other sites and linked to your website.
There are many methods and tools that enable you to check and repair your site’s links with complete safety, but the easiest way to check links in WordPress is to use one of the free plugins such as Link Checker Professional or Broken Link Checker , which we will explain in the next paragraph.
Check website links using Broken Link Checker
The Broken Link Checker plugin has many benefits when it comes to checking WordPress links, and provides many options that enable you to adjust the checks exactly as you want.
In order to be able to check your site links using Broken Link Checker, you must first install and activate the plugin on your site by following one of the methods that we explained in the article ( How to install a WordPress plugin and activate it on your site correctly ).
Once the plugin is installed and activated, two new options will appear in the side menu tabs in the WordPress control panel . One of them is ( Broken Links ), which will appear under the Options tab ( Tools ), and the second is ( Link Checker ), which will appear under the Options tab ( Settings ).
Through the broken links page, you can view the links that are not working properly on your site and the status of each of them, while the page that is taken to when you click on the ( link checker ) option provides the ability to modify the settings for checking links on the site, and it includes many options that Through it, you can adjust the scanning process in a way that does not affect the site’s performance.
Broken Link Checker Settings page
After installing and activating the add-on on your site, it will automatically scan all links based on the default settings. You can follow the progress of the scanning process in the ( General ) tab on the ( Broken Link Checker Settings ) page, but subsequent scans will be based on the settings that you specify if you change the settings. Default.
The broken link checker settings page includes 5 tabs, each of which contains a set of options related to a specific aspect of the link checking process, as:
- The ( General ) tab contains the main general settings, through which you can specify how long site links will be checked, customize email alerts, and more.
- Through the ( Search for links in ) tab, you can specify the places where existing links will be scanned. If you do not want links in comments to be scanned, for example, you can specify that through this tab.
- Through the ( Which links should be scanned? ) tab, you can specify the types of links that will be scanned, and exclude links from the scan based on the fact that their title contains a specific word that you enter.
- From the options of the ( Protocols and APIs ) tab, you can specify the methods by which links will be checked. It is preferable to leave them as they are if you do not have good experience in this topic.
- The ( Advanced Settings ) tab includes a set of advanced options, including options that adjust the tool’s operation to prevent it from affecting the site’s performance, such as the longest period during which the tool will operate, the percentage that performance is allowed to use of the available server resources, and others.
It is very easy to know what each of the settings in these tabs does, as the names of most of them are mentioned in Arabic, and there are also sentences explaining and clarifying what the slightly ambiguous options do at the bottom of the option, and therefore you will not have difficulty adjusting the options according to what they do. You want.
Broken links page
The Broken Links page shows all the broken links that were detected by the add-on, and allows you to know a lot of information about them, in addition to the possibility of performing a set of actions on them to fix the defect, modify the link classification, etc.
As you can see in the previous image, broken links appear on the page in the same way that articles appear on the (All Articles) page, where each row of information on the page is allocated to a specific link, and each row includes the following information in order:
- Address: This is the URL of the link, and you should see an error when you visit this address by entering it in the browser.
- Status: It expresses the status of the error and its number. This can be used to obtain more information about the error by searching the Internet. Details of the error can also be known by clicking on the word ( Details ) that appears when you pass the mouse cursor over the status statement.
- Anchor text: It is the phrase or element of the link that appears on the front end of the visitor.
- Source: It is the title of the article or page (or other) in which the broken link is located. You can go to its editing page, delete it, or view it through the options that appear below the title.
It is worth noting that this page shows both internal and external broken links on the site, but it does not show broken backlinks found on other sites. Therefore, another method must be used to check backlinks, and we will shed light on that in a later paragraph.
Repair broken links on the site
Although it is absolutely necessary to repair broken internal and external links on a website, doing so is very easy and does not require high-level technical knowledge or any programming experience. There are also many ways to repair website links, one of which is enough to be executed with two clicks of the mouse button.
On the broken links page that we talked about in the previous paragraph, you will find a set of options below each of the broken links on the page when you hover your mouse over the link. Through these options, you can repair the link in question in several ways, but the best correct order of what you should do is as follows:
- Copy the URL of the broken link, then visit it through an incognito window using your browser. If it works fine, it means it’s not actually broken, it’s also classified as a result of a permissions error or something, so you can leave it as it is added on the page. Broken links, or you can click ( not broken ) to remove it.
- If the URL does not work for you in the incognito window, and the link is already broken, get the correct working URL, then click ( Edit Address ) and enter the new (correct) address, then click the ( Refresh ) button, then click ( Recheck , and make sure that the status has changed to ( 200 valid ).
- If there is no working link that can be inserted instead of the broken link, click ( Remove Link ) to remove it and convert its text into a regular text phrase, but you must make sure here before removing the link that this does not harm the quality of the content, that is, it must not be text. For example, the link (click here to download the game), and if removing the link will harm the quality of the content, you must make appropriate modifications to the content to neutralize the harmful effect of removing the link, in order to maintain a satisfactory user experience on the site.
The same previous steps can be repeated for all broken links on the page, and a specific action can be performed (removing the link, modifying the address, etc.) on a group of links at the same time by selecting them, choosing the action from the drop-down list at the top, then clicking on the button ( application ).
Check backlinks on other sites and fix them
It is not possible to check the backlinks to your site using the Broken Link Checker add-on because it is intended for checking links found within the content of the site itself, and the backlinks are located on other sites whose control panel you cannot access.
However, there is an easy way to check the backlinks of your website, and it is based on the fact that when a visitor clicks on the backlink of your website in the site that includes the backlink, he will be transferred to your site, and if the link is broken, it will generate a 404 error on your site.
This idea can be relied upon to examine backlinks, as you can monitor requests that generate 404 errors by using the Rank Math SEO add-on (or another add-on that provides the ability to perform this task), as we explained in the paragraph (How to detect a 404 error problem). In the article ( Solving the Error 404 not found problem on your WordPress site ).
After knowing the URL addresses of the requests that generate 404 errors by monitoring them using one of the add-ons, you can compare them with the addresses of the broken links on the site, which can be known from the broken links page as we explained above, and based on the results you can extract backlinks. Your site is damaged, as:
- When you find a link that generated a 404 error, but it is not on the broken links page, then there is a high probability that it is a broken backlink.
- When you find a title that generated a 404 error, and it is located on the Broken Links page, this means with a high probability that it is a broken internal link, and not a backlink.
After identifying the broken backlink, you can find its source through link reports in Google Webmaster Tools , then contact the owner of the site that hosts the link to modify or remove it, or you can redirect the user to another appropriate page.
It should be noted that there are other more professional and accurate methods that provide the ability to detect broken backlinks, but they are not free, including the Ahrefs Site Explorer tool , which provides a report that includes all broken backlinks to your website.
And here, dear reader, we have finished explaining how to check website links in WordPress, and how to fix them easily, and we would like to draw attention once again in conclusion to the fact that checking and repairing the links on the site and the backlinks that lead to it is very important, because it improves the user experience. Satisfactory, and raises the site’s ranking in search results.
