Description
Developed by Koke Perez.
Niquelao Link Guard finds the broken links on your site and helps you fix them, with an approach designed to avoid hurting your hosting performance and to reduce false positives.
Key differences:
- Incremental scanning: it only analyzes new or edited content (when each post is saved), instead of re-scanning the whole site over and over.
- Low resource usage: HTTP checks run in batches in the background via cron, never during your visitors page loads. Batch size and pause between requests are configurable.
- Fewer false positives: retries with increasing delays (1, 3 and 7 days) and respect for the
Retry-Afterheader before confirming a link as broken. 403 responses and timeouts are marked as “review”, not “broken”. - 100% local suggestions: for broken internal links, it proposes the correct URL by matching slug/title against your own database. For 301/302 redirects, it suggests updating to the final URL. No AI calls, no API keys, no subscriptions.
- Bulk fixing: remove the link keeping the text, replace it with the suggested or a manual URL, or mark it as ignored, all from the admin panel.
- Undo history / trash: every change is logged and can be reverted. Content edits are restored from the WordPress revision created before the change, and deleted or ignored records can be restored too.
- Security scan (local): flags suspicious or malicious links using local heuristics – spam keywords, text/target mismatch (phishing), obfuscated URLs, risky TLDs, URL shorteners, dangerous schemes – plus injected content like scripts, iframes and hidden text. A risk level and its reasons are shown for full transparency.
- Transparency: each result shows the exact HTTP status code and the reason for its classification.
- Prioritization: links are sorted by number of occurrences so you fix the highest-impact ones first.
Screenshots
Installation
- Upload the
niquelao-link-guardfolder to/wp-content/plugins/. - Activate the plugin from the WordPress “Plugins” menu.
- Go to “Link Guard” in the admin menu and click “Scan all content”.
- Adjust the behavior under “Link Guard -> Settings”.
Multisite: activate the plugin per site (site by site), not network-wide. Each site keeps its own link tables, settings and history. Network activation is supported and will set up every existing site, but per-site activation is the recommended and tested mode.
FAQ
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Does it send data to external services?
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No. The only network requests are the HTTP checks to your own link URLs, which is the plugin’s core function. There is no AI, no API keys and no subscriptions.
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Does it work on multisite?
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Yes. It is designed to run per site: each site has its own scan tables, settings and undo history, and data is isolated between sites. Per-site activation is the recommended mode. If you activate it network-wide, it will set up every existing site automatically, but it does not add a network-level admin screen.
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Will it slow down my site?
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No. Checks run in batches in the background using WP-Cron, never during page loads for visitors. You can reduce the batch size and increase the pause between requests in the settings.
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Does it modify my content without permission?
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No. Fixes (remove/replace) are only applied when you confirm them from the panel.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Niquelao Link Guard” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “Niquelao Link Guard” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
0.6.3
- Renamed the internal code prefix from “nlg” to “niquelao_lg” (classes, options, constants, hooks, transients) to meet the WordPress.org prefix requirement and match the rest of the Niquelao suite. Settings are migrated automatically on update. Database table names were already unique and are unchanged.
- Added kokenet to the contributors list.
0.6.1
- Compliance polish for the WordPress.org review: exact-slug lookups in the suggester now use the core
get_page_by_path()API instead of a direct SQL query; the outgoing User-Agent header now runs the site URL throughesc_url_raw(); and multisite behavior is documented (per-site design, with network activation setting up every existing site). No functional change for single-site installs.
0.6.0
- New history and trash screen: every content or record change is logged and can be undone. Content changes are restored from the WordPress revision created before the change; deleted records and ignored links can be restored too. Entries older than 30 days are pruned automatically.
0.5.0
- New local security scan: flags suspicious or malicious links (spam keywords, phishing text/target mismatch, obfuscated URLs, risky TLDs, URL shorteners, dangerous schemes) and injected content (scripts, iframes, inline event handlers, hidden text). 100% local, no external services.
- New “Risk” column with level and transparent reasons, a “Suspicious” filter, and a dashboard alert when high-risk links are found.
0.4.3
- Occurrences column now lists the posts and pages where each link appears, with view and edit links for each one.
0.4.2
- Coding standards and WordPress.org guideline compliance (readme in English, documented direct DB access).
0.4.1
- Settings screen with scanning, performance and exclusion controls.
- readme.txt and repository preparation.
0.3.0
- Local suggester for broken internal links by slug/title similarity.
- Update suggestion for 301/302 redirects.
0.2.0
- Single and bulk actions: remove, replace, ignore, recheck.
0.1.0
- Core: incremental scanning, cron-based checking and results panel.