We’re happy to announce that WPMU DEV team has taken over the maintenance of Broken Link Checker plugin. We are pleased to have found a great team willing to take ownership of the plugin and keep it maintained for the benefit of everyone in the WordPress community.

ManageWP took ownership of Broken Link Checker some time ago in order to use its codebase to build an improved version of the same plugin. Once we started working on it, we realised that we need a complete different approach and decided to build our own solution for link checking. 

While our team will focus on maintaining our version of the link checker, we recognised that a lot of users (700K+) still rely on Broken Link Checker and wanted to find a good home for it. It took us a while to find a team that has previous contributions and activity in the WordPress space, good reputation and necessary team size a.k.a. willingness and resources to properly maintain and invest into this plugin.

So why give up BLC in the first place?

You probably know already that the BLC plugin uses a lot of site server resources, which resulted in some hosts banning the plugin. Once we started working on a fully automated upgrade that uses a fraction of the site server resources, we realised it can’t be free.

So, we decided to keep BLC as is, and forked our improvements into the Link Monitor add-on for ManageWP which we launched in May 2019. It is an advanced version of Broken Link Checker with additional functionalities that is much lighter on the website resources as everything is run from our architecture.  

Our WordPress team is also working hard on improving our on-boarding process (which you can read more about in this article on WP Tavern) and with GoDaddy acquisition of CoBlocks earlier this year, we are getting a page builder experience with the block editor significantly easier.

As our investments are focused elsewhere, we’re passing the plugin to another team in the WordPress ecosystem that is excited to push it further and continue to improve it.

Why WPMU DEV?

It’s primarily due to their past WordPress contributions and history of maintaining free plugins in the WP repo, especially back in 2018 when they offered a whole bunch of their plugins for free (https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/wpmudev-for-free/).

They also have a large enough team, and we know some of their members well enough to be certain that they won’t try any shenanigans that happened with WordPress plugins changing hands (bitcoin mining, injections, etc.).

Conclusion

We believe that this is the decision that will benefit everyone, and are happy that we found a great team that not only interested in maintaining it but is excited to continue the development and improve what we have started.

This way, we continue investing into Link Monitor by improving it and adding new functionalities while BLC gets a new home and a team that is willing to keep it up-to-date for everyone that is ready to use it in it’s current form.

As always, we’re happy to answer any BLC/Link Monitor related questions you might have. Just post them in the comments below.