Wayback Machine debuts a new plugin designed to fix the problem of broken links on the Internet

The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization – as you might expect – dedicated to archiving the Internet and preserving its digital context for future generations. This week, the platform announced a new tool designed to expand on that mission by helping the world’s WordPress users keep their articles at the peak of digital health.

The archive’s Wayback Machine, which indexes the web through large-scale snapshots, has partnered with Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Together, the two organizations have launched a new plugin for WordPress – Link Fixer – designed to combat the scourge of “link rot.”

“Link rot” is an unfortunate phenomenon where online articles become filled with broken links – URLs that once led to active pages but now lead to error messages or dead ends. A 2024 Pew Research Center study showed that nearly 40% of the links that existed in 2013 are no longer active. Such “digital degradation” occurs across a wide range of web pages, from news and government websites to Wikipedia pages to tweets.

Automattic says its new plugin works by scanning your WordPress posts for outbound links, then going back to the Wayback Machine to look for archived versions of those links. If there are none, new snapshots of the respective articles will be taken automatically. If the linked web page stops working, the new feature will then redirect readers to the archived versions, so there is no drop in service. The tool also archives a user’s private posts, which helps ensure their continuity.

The tool is designed to keep website visitors reading the best version of the web page available. In fact, Automattic’s plugin constantly checks web page links, and if the original link that was offline is revived, the plugin will start redirecting the user to that original page again instead of the archived copy.

A write-up on Github shows that the plugin’s controls are relatively easy to maneuver and offer convenient customization. For example, users can specify how often they want the plugin to check the link for validity (the default setting offered by the plugin is every three days).