For a long time, The Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress was the “perfect little plugin”. You’d install it, and the plugin just did what it was supposed to do, without slowing down your site.
In the last week-or-so (early March 2023) I’ve seen the plugin update itself to version 2.0 across all my sites. It’s quite a big change, and users are not happy about it (me included).
It seems the new version wants its user-base to sign up to a WPMU Dev account. That way, WPMU Dev can do the site scanning from their servers. Although this makes sense from an architectural point-of-view, we’re not a fan of being forced into hooking-up with a specific WordPress hosting provider to do it. I’m not saying anything against WPMU Dev here (I’ve never used them), but I think it’s time to look around for a new way of checking for broken links.
Taking a product that worked well, then trying to coral the user based into an online subscription service… not a great experience. Such a shame.
