=== Link Checker ===
Contributors: mbsec
Tags: link checker, broken links, dead links, dead link checker, broken link checker, broken, link, links, maintenance, plugin, seo
Requires at least: 4.2
Tested up to: 4.3
Stable tag: 1.0.0-beta.3
License: GPL v3
License URI: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

An easy to use link checker for WordPress to detect broken internal and external links on your website.

== Description ==
The [Link Checker](https://www.marcobeierer.com/wordpress-plugins/link-checker) for WordPress uses an external service to crawl your website and and find broken links on your website. 

In contrast to search engine tools like the Google Search Console, which only show if a URL on your website is not reachable, it does not matter for the Link Checker if the links leads to an internal or external URL. The Link Checker will find all dead links. 

The Link Checker works for every plugin out of the box. The computation costs for your website is also very low because the crawler does the heavy work and just acts like a normal visitor, who visits all pages of you website once.

= Features =
* Simple setup.
* Works out of the box with all WordPress plugins.
* Low computation costs for your webserver.

= Technical Features =
* Respects your robots.txt file (also the crawl-delay directive).

= Upcoming Technical Features =
* Support for checking the availability of embedded images, videos, CSS files and JS files.

= Limitations =
During the beta phase the service is limited to check the first 500 URLs of your website. After the beta phase, you could buy a token to check up to 50000 URLs. If you already need more URLs, please contact me by email.

= Use of an External Server =
The Link Checker uses an external server, operated by the developer of the plugin, to crawl your website and detect broken links. This means, that there is some communication between your website and the server. The only data that is communicated to the external server by your website is the URL of your website and the fact that you are using WordPress. The server than crawlers your website (as a normal visitor does) and answers with a list of the found broken links.

== Installation ==
1. Upload the 'link-checker' folder to the '/wp-content/plugins/' directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.
3. Access the generator with the "Link Checker" button in the sidebar and use the "Check your website" button to start the process. 
4. The found broken links will be reported to you when the crawler has finished.

== Screenshots ==

1. List of broken links found by the Link Checker.

== Changelog ==
= 1.0.0-beta.3 =
*Release Date - 21th August, 2015*

*Please note that the plugin was not changed, just the backend service.*

* The Link Checker is now able to detect the same dead link on multiple pages. Until now the Link Checker only showed the first page where the dead link was found.
* Pages, blocked by the robots.txt file, were not parsed in earlier version. This is fixed now.
* Fixed an issue with the evaluation of the HTML base tag. A base tag href value with a trailing slash was not evaluated correctly before.
* Implemented a timeout on the connection. URLs which time out are shown with an error 500 in the Link Checker.
* Some smaller bug fixes and performance improvements.

= 1.0.0-beta.2 =
*Release Date - 14th August, 2015*

* Changed menu position to a more unique one.

= 1.0.0-beta.1 =
*Release Date - 8th August, 2015*

* Initial release.