 Hello. Thank you for being here today. I'm Peter D. Hahn, and I'm going to talk about the broken link checker plug-in. And I'm going to tell you everything I know in the next 14 minutes. Are you ready? There are two reasons why we want to be concerned about broken links. One is it hurts the user experience. I don't know about you, but myself, if I'm on the website and I click on a link and it doesn't work, I'm going to abandon that website unless I'm very, very vested in what I want to find out. So that's a quick way to get me off your website is to feed me a broken link. The other is that most SEO experts say that Google will penalize your organic search results if you have a site with broken links. And I can guarantee you that if you haven't checked your site for broken links on a regular basis, you have a lot of them there that you don't know about. So those are two reasons why we want to address broken links. There are two ways to deal with it. One is off-site solutions. And I have played with some of those and got very quickly frustrated because they were cumbersome to use. And they gave me a lot of false positives that I had to wade through. Maybe hundreds or thousands of things to check, which really weren't broken links but came up as errors. Now, maybe I didn't look at the right resources, but the ones I used, I quickly rejected as being so cumbersome that I would never actually use them. Which brings us to on-site solutions or plug-ins. And that's where I've landed on is on-site solution using a plug-in to check broken links. For those of you who are end users, I recommend that you put this plug-in on your website. For those of you that are developers or provide any sort of service to website users, this is something you could add as an added value to your services or as an additional sale where you can tell them I will monitor your site for broken links and check them and fix them each month. And yes, they could add the plug-in themselves, but they probably won't. And if they do add the plug-in, they may not configure it correctly or may not follow through with fixing them. So you are the one way of guaranteeing that the broken links will be fixed. So the broken link checker plug-in has two sections. One is the configuration section. And the other is the user section. And I'm going to talk about both of those. Some shared hosting service providers don't want you to use broken link checker because if you configure it incorrectly, it can be a real drag on resources and can actually slow down the site. And I've actually tried using some shared hosting providers that actually said don't use it. Now they let me use it anyway, but they weren't too happy about it. And the reason is that some people configured incorrectly. When you go into the settings for the broken link checker, on your general settings, the very first thing is your status, which just gives you some information about what it has found. Next below that is how often they check each link. And this is where people get into trouble because they might say, well, check it every hour. Well, that's going to give you information very quickly, but it's going to keep your server cranking through links on a regular basis and slow things down. As a side effect, it's also going to give you some false positives where maybe they checked a link at this instance and it didn't look very good. So they flagged it as an error, but then later on it fixed itself. You don't want to have to wade through all those. I actually have to go through once a week, which is 168 hours. Now every time you add a link or add a page or add a post, it will check those links right away. So what it's checking on a weekly basis is links that have been on your site pre-existing. And those, for the large part, are not going to break very often. You don't need to be checking them every hour or even every day, but the lesser frequency is all that you really need. And that's under the general tab. There are three more tabs, which you can pretty much leave as defaults. You can play with them a little bit if you want to. The middle one, which links to check, is misleading because it also has a section, which links to ignore. So if you have a certain website, you just want to ignore all the links on that website. You can flag those in that section. The advanced tab is where you want to give some focus. The first one is a timeout. Now I would never wait 30 seconds to see if a link is going to work before it times out. But if you set that too low, it's, again, going to give you some false positives. Maybe it happened to check a link when that site was momentarily overloaded and it looked like it was broken, but if you gave it a few more seconds, it would come through fine. Sometimes I use 30 seconds, sometimes even a minute. The next one, the link monitor. You can run it continuously while your dashboard is open. That will slow down the responsiveness of your dashboard. One time I turned it on, and I intended it to be a short-term thing. I forgot to turn it off. The next time I'm in the site, and it's just, and that isn't admin, it's going so slowly, and I turned off that option and it speeded up for me. And you can also check to run hourly in the background. And there's going to be something on the next site that will tie into that. As you scroll down that page, there's a server load limit. And I believe this only applies to shared hosting sites where it looks at the server load of the host. And if you surpass the host traffic, surpasses a certain threshold, then it will suspend link checking, which is good for the host. It's bad for you because you don't know if you have broken links or not. One time I was on a host that my particular server was overburdened for a couple of weeks. And the server load was running consistently high, and it stopped my link checking for a couple of weeks. Now you can manually go in and bump up the setting threshold to overrun that, overwrite that. But that's dangerous, and it does go very slowly when you do that. So that's the second area where people come in the problem is they don't care about the host. They'll set that threshold as high as they want so they can get their link scanned. But that does drag everything down. The very last option at the bottom is force recheck. And they call that the nuclear option. I'm really tickled by that label. But basically that means you can go in and click that button, and it will automatically be in the rechecking every single link on your site at that point on. There are two good times to use that. One is if you move from one host to another. For some reason, it confuses links. Probably you know why that happens. I don't, I just know what happens. And by checking them right away, you can find those and fix those. Usually they're things they have to redirect them properly. The other is, say, moving sites. The other is going from a development to an online version. I've had problems with links in those instances as well. And that cranks through them very quickly. So that's the configuration aspect of it. And then the tools aspect of it, and you can see it's under the tools settings. I actually did the screen capture before the last version of WordPress came out, which has the GRDP or whatever options, which will appear below the broken links. But there's the broken links option there. And you can see along the top, there are five different categories. All is the number of links it checks. And broken is the number of broken links. Warnings is the number of warnings. The number of redirects, the number of dismissed links. And the reason that I'm not doing this live is the number of what I don't like live demos, because they always backfire on me. The other thing is I like to keep my sites nice and clean, so I didn't want to purposely leave broken links on my site so I could show you what they look like. So these are all screen captures. So under the broken links section, it has one broken link on this particular site. And you can see it gives the URL of the site, and it gives me some options. I can edit the URL, I can unlink it, I can flag it as not broken. I can dismiss it, or I can click on recheck. If you click on recheck, it usually rechecks it very quickly. You can also click on the link, and it will open up that page in the separate tab on your browser, which is probably the quickest way to find out if it's working or not, or what you might be dealing with. On the far left, you can edit the post, you can view the post, you can trash the post. I've never done that. It seems a little extreme. And then you see in the middle on your status, there's the Details tab. If you click on that, then it gives details about why it thinks it's broken. The main thing I look at is in the lower left-hand corner, the number of times it's failed and the length of time it has failed. If it's only been a couple hours and I want, and I think the link is good, it's just a temporary thing, I'll ignore it, but if it's been there for a week, two weeks, then I'm pretty sure that that link will never work again, and then so I want to remove it rather than try to wait it out or fix it. In one of the setup screens, and I must have missed this, but there's an option for you to enter your email address. If you put your email address in, it will email you every time there's a broken link found. I apologize for skipping that. Warnings is a link that is potentially suspect. It may be good, it may be bad. And that's just things to watch. Usually things that come up on the warning list will clear themselves within a day or so. So it's usually not a big deal. If I'm busy, I skip this. If I have a little extra time, I'll explore them. Usually I find that the links are working. The next area is redirects. And the redirect is, as you would think, when a link redirects from what you have in your site to something else. Where this happens most often is when people change to SSL. And you've got HTTP, and you're supposed to have HTTPS, and that will come up as a redirect. And you can click on the Fixed Redirect button, or you can edit the URL. Those will both be ways to fix it. This will display up to 30 redirects per page. You can click on the global box there, or highlight all 30 of them, and you can fix all 30 redirects all at one time. When I switched one of my sites to SSL, I had 3,200 internal links that needed to be redirected. So I was glad I could do them in batches of 30. And even that took a while. The final thing is dismissed. For some reason, broken link checker flags Twitter and LinkedIn as being redirected. And no matter what you do, that's always going to come up as an error. So what I do with those is I just simply dismiss them. It goes into the dismissed column. And I believe periodically it puts it back out and has you check them again. But that's a good thing to avoid nuisances. That is the end of my presentation and the end of my time. I will hang out outside if you want to talk to me more about this. Thank you very much for your time and attention and for putting up with my cold and my sore throat and all that. I appreciate it. Have a great rest of the day.