A few weeks ago, Automattic released a new plugin in partnership with Archive.org, the famous “library of websites” (and much more). Named “Wayback Link Fixer”, this plugin helps you tackle a very common issue on websites, especially older and larger ones: link rot.
Also known as link death or reference rot, link rot is the phenomenon where hyperlinks on the internet become broken or non-functional over time, typically leading to a 404 “Page Not Found” error. On top of making the user experience less enjoyable, these errors also contribute to negatively impacting your website’s SEO.
To solve this issue, the Wayback Link Fixer monitors your links to find broken links. If a link appears broken, it will come back to it several times before archiving it and changing the link, avoiding many false positives this way.
The Wayback Link Fixer is very straightforward to install, just like any other WordPress plugin. Once you have installed it and activated it from the plugin browser or by uploading the zip file, you will be taken to an easy to follow setup wizard.
The first thing to do is to obtain Archive.org API access keys if you don’t have them already. For that purpose, you can just create an account on the website and you will be able to access the API keys.
Once your keys are set up, you can decide how to handle link fixing for various post types and decide how to handle the scanning of existing content.
Last step, you will be able to enable the auto archiver, which automatically archives your content on the Internet Archive each time you publish or save changes to a post.
Once setup, the plugin will start scanning your content and archiving links. If a link goes offline, it will be redirected to the Internet Archive page, so you don’t have a broken link.
As tested, it works flawlessly, but I did end up removing it from the website I installed it on, as it redirected some links that were only temporarily offline. As a result, it made the website less efficient for that matter. The perfect scenario would be to have an automation in place to check on archived links to reverse them if the link is back online. As a conclusion, I’d say that it’s a great plugin for large websites where broken links can’t be managed easily. However, you need to be aware of the downside before you install it, so you know what trade-off you may have to do.
