Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer

Since November 2025, I’ve tested the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer plugin against my custom command-line link checker. Here are my comments. Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer Positives Continuous link checking Standard WP administrator interface Negatives A high false positive rate means you need to manually verify every flagged link. For example, recently, I saw amazon.com flagged as a 404. Deal breaker. Automated replacements can unnecessarily replace links. To stop Link Fixer from redirecting to the Wayback Machine for amazon.com (and other good links), I needed to add a random query parameter (?t) to good links. Then I needed to exclude the original good link (that was flagged as a 404) and exclude the new ?t version on top of that (double work for every good link). Deal breaker. Poor interpretation of HTTP status codes and no way to tweak that. Deal breaker. Time sink from managing exclusions (no support for bulk action > exclude link) and doing workarounds for the false positives (see #2 above). High risk of replacing current content with outdated (sometimes totally ancient) archives. Poor visitor experience with unexpected link manipulation to Wayback Machine pages. At first, shocking and confusing, then annoying. Content quality degradation from linking to super old information instead of intelligently finding fresh and relevant pages. Real broken links (e.g., 404s) are not actually fixed in the HTML. So search bots will still see broken links (false sense of security). Dynamically replacing broken links does not help SEO. Google doesn’t guarantee crawling client-side rendering. Not geared towards human content editors. Shows all broken links across the entire site in one long list. No grouping by document or page. No context about which document contains which broken links. It’s not easy for content writers like me to navigate and fix links. The “Back to All Links” button is buggy. I expect to return to the main list of links. Instead, it acts like the browser back button. Example link for “Back to All Links”: admin.php?page=iawmlf-links&iawmlf_link_id=1401. On top of that, clicking “Back to All Links” submits the last HTTP request (which can undo any edits without you knowing—gnarly). All Link Fixer admin pages show the same page title. That makes it difficult to navigate back to specific links using the browser history. In the screen capture attached, you cannot tell that the links are actually to different pages. Phantom (orphaned) links: Links remain in the checking queue even when they’re no longer present in any post or page. This creates wasted processing cycles. cluttered interface, and confusion about which links need attention. I needed to manually exclude each orphaned link, so at least I know which ones I can ignore. Custom code solution More control My custom solution is only semi-automated, but I define how to handle HTTP status codes and what my link replacements should be.   Real link fixing My broken links are “really” fixed when I edit my posts and pages (bonus: my edits update the “last modified” date). Search bots will see my real fixed links, and my “freshness” score gets a boost. Document-centric workflow My custom solution generates a report ordered by page. For each page with a 404 link, it lists the broken URL, the link text for that URL, and Claude Code suggestions for replacement candidates. Screen captures False positives: jumpshare dot com /share/VNPnKIoPF3khooUfnEO8 Same page title in browser history: jumpshare dot com /share/ADuvrhg7Xay2lzxv66QS Parting thoughts We’d definitely reconsider using this plugin if the major deal breakers are addressed. ☺️

While this is a great plugin on paper, it sadly does not seem to respect its own “Exclude this link” settings. Additionally, it will sometimes report links that are fully online and functional as being down. Figured forcing “Exclude this link” would resolve this, or at least make it so I can exclude links from being redirected. But no. It does nothing.

I love the idea of the plugin, but it has a major technical flaw. When activated, the blog’s frontend tries to load scripts and/or resources from the wp-admin directory, and I think this is something a plugin shouldn’t do. I protect wp-admin via htaccess as an additional measure against hackers, so my frontend threw some errors for ordinary users. I suggest fixing the plugin by moving frontend resources to wp-content. Otherwise a great project. Thank you Archive.org people for doing great work!

I had a very poor experience after installing the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer plugin. Immediately after activation, my website became completely inaccessible. I could not open any page on the frontend, and the site showed errors or failed to load entirely. The only way to regain access was to log into the WordPress control panel and uninstall the plugin manually. As long as this plugin remained active, the site was unusable. This behavior is extremely risky, especially for live or business websites, as it can cause sudden downtime without any clear warning or recovery option. There was no proper error message, no fallback mechanism, and no indication of what caused the conflict. For a plugin that modifies links automatically, this level of instability is unacceptable. Because of this experience, I would strongly advise other users to avoid installing this plugin on a live site or to test it only in a staging environment first. In its current state, it feels unreliable and potentially harmful. Overall, this plugin caused more problems than it solved, and I cannot recommend it.

This has been working perfectly for me, and the only slight annoyance isn’t the plugin’s fault or even the Archive’s fault. Some sites block the Archive from archiving them, so they appear to the link checker as broken links too. Give a quick look through broken links on your Dashboard’s Posts section from time to time, as there might be a few you’ll need to add to the Link Exclusions under Advanced Settings. The benefits far outweigh the effort it takes to monitor that yourself. 🙂

Marriage made in Heaven. Eigentlich nur verwunderlich, dass da nicht schon früher jemand draufgekommen ist.