Every WordPress site quietly accumulates internal-linking debt. Posts get published in a hurry without a single link pointing to them. Old links break when slugs change. A handful of pages collect all the attention while the rest sit three or four clicks deep where neither readers nor Google bother to go. None of this announces itself \u2014 you only see it when you actually check. The good news: checking is free, and it takes an afternoon, not a week.<\/p>\n
This guide walks through the internal link checkers we actually use \u2014 Google Search Console, a desktop crawler, a couple of search-operator tricks, and WordPress plugins that report from inside the site \u2014 plus what “healthy” looks like once you have the numbers in front of you.<\/p>\n
Before opening any tool, it helps to know what you’re looking for. A useful audit answers four questions:<\/p>\n
If your site is verified in Search Console, you already have an internal link checker \u2014 it’s just well hidden. In the left sidebar, scroll to the bottom and open Links<\/strong>. The right-hand column, “Internal links”, lists your pages sorted by how many internal links Google found pointing to each one.<\/p>\n How we read this report:<\/p>\n The limits: the report only counts links Google has crawled, updates on Google’s schedule rather than yours, and won’t flag broken links at all. It’s a great free snapshot, not a complete audit.<\/p>\n Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is the standard desktop crawler, and the free tier handles up to 500 URLs \u2014 enough for most blogs. Point it at your homepage, let it crawl, and three views do most of the work:<\/p>\n The paid version adds scheduling and bigger crawls, but for a periodic manual audit the free tier is genuinely enough.<\/p>\n Two search tricks that cost nothing and take seconds:<\/p>\n These are approximations \u2014 Google’s operators are increasingly loose \u2014 but for spotting “I’ve written about this five times and never linked any of them together”, they’re surprisingly effective.<\/p>\n Crawlers see your site from the outside; a plugin sees the actual post content in the database, which makes it the most convenient option for ongoing monitoring rather than one-off audits. A good internal-linking plugin will report orphaned posts, broken internal links, and per-post inlink counts right in the dashboard, and let you fix issues from the same screen instead of bouncing between a crawl export and the editor.<\/p>\n Full disclosure: JnK Linkweave<\/a> is our own plugin \u2014 the free core on WordPress.org includes an orphaned-content report, a broken-link checker, and per-post link counts, because those are exactly the checks we kept running by hand. Internal Link Juicer and Link Whisper offer reporting along similar lines; our plugin comparison<\/a> goes through the whole field if you want to weigh options.<\/p>\n Numbers without a benchmark are just numbers. The targets we aim for:<\/p>\n\n
Method 2: Crawl the site with Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs)<\/h2>\n
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Method 3: Quick checks with the site: operator<\/h2>\n
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site:yourdomain.com \"exact phrase from a post\"<\/code> \u2014 confirms whether a page is indexed at all before you worry about its links.<\/li>\nsite:yourdomain.com intext:\"anchor text\"<\/code> \u2014 a rough way to find which of your pages mention a phrase, i.e. candidate spots to add a contextual link toward the page that covers that topic.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nMethod 4: Check from inside WordPress with a plugin<\/h2>\n
What “good” looks like<\/h2>\n