Glimmernet Spot Check

Description

Spot Check is an on-demand broken link checker. It checks the links on one post or page the moment you ask, and shows you the results right away. No crawling, no clutter, no false alarms.

Why crawl a whole site to check links that never change?

Here is something most people never think about: the internal links on your site barely change. Once a page links to your contact form, that link usually stays put for months. So why do most link checkers crawl your entire site, around the clock, to catch a handful of changes?

Spot Check flips that idea. When you are working on a page, you check that page’s links right then, on the content you are actually touching. The name says what it does.

It is not meant to replace a full site-wide scanner. Tools like Broken Link Checker are great for catching external links that rot over time. But Spot Check handles the day-to-day “are the links on this page good?” question, so you can run those heavy scans far less often.

That matters, because crawlers are hard on a server. Fetching every link on every page eats CPU and memory, which is why some hosts throttle or block them. Spot Check only works when you ask, on the single page in front of you. It never hammers your server in the background.

Three steps. That’s the whole tool.

1. Open a post or page, or hover over it in your post list.
2. Click “Check Links.”
3. Watch each link turn green, red, or yellow as it is checked.

Nothing runs until you click, and nothing is saved when you close it.

What the colors mean

• Green — works. The link loads fine. Nothing to fix.
• Red — broken. The link is dead, or it is an empty placeholder. Fix this one.
• Yellow — couldn’t verify. The site blocked the check. It is probably fine, so give it a click.
• Gray — skipped. Some links can’t be checked, like email and in-page anchors.

Built to be trusted, not just busy

• On-demand, not always-on. It checks the page in front of you, when you ask. No background crawling, no cron jobs, no slowdown.
• Honest results. Some sites block automated checks and answer “403 Forbidden.” Other tools call those broken. Spot Check marks them yellow and lets you decide, so you only chase real problems.
• Start a check from any editor. The button lives in the WordPress toolbar and your post list. It works the same with the Block Editor, Classic Editor, Divi, Kadence, and other builders.
• Safe by design. Spot Check never changes your content. It only reports. Only people who can edit a post can check its links.
• Light footprint. It stores one small settings row and nothing else. No link history. Uninstalling cleans up after itself.

What gets checked

Spot Check reads the saved body of one post, which is the content you write in the editor. It does not check links in your header, footer, menu, sidebar, or widgets, because those live outside the post body. It also does not see links created on the fly by dynamic blocks, like a “latest posts” block.

Page builders come down to where each one keeps its content. These store the page right in the post body, where Spot Check reads it well:

• Block Editor (Gutenberg)
• Classic Editor
• Divi
• Kadence
• WPBakery Page Builder

These keep their layout in a separate place. How much Spot Check catches depends on the builder, sometimes most of the links and sometimes only a few. It flags these with a note in the results, so you know to double-check:

• Elementor
• Beaver Builder
• Oxygen
• Bricks

How the checking works

Links to your own site are checked right in your browser, which is fast and adds no load to your server. Links to other sites are checked by your server instead. This split is needed because of a browser security rule: browsers can’t read responses from other websites, but servers can. Checks run a few at a time, and results appear as each one finishes.

Settings

Visit Settings -> Spot Check to adjust a few things:

• Post types. Spot Check works on all public post types by default, including custom ones. New types are turned on automatically. Untick any type to turn it off.
• Request timeout. How long the server waits for an external link before giving up. The default is 8 seconds.
• User-Agent. The browser identity sent with server-side checks. A realistic one avoids being mistaken for a bot. The default is fine for most sites.
• Blocked responses. Choose whether “blocked” answers like 403 are treated as yellow (couldn’t verify) or red (broken). Yellow is the default, and we recommend keeping it.