The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization dedicated, as you might expect, to archiving the Internet and preserving its digital context for future generations. This week, the platform announced a new tool designed to expand that mission by helping the world’s WordPress users keep their articles in tip-top digital health.
The Archive’s Wayback Machine, which indexes the web through augmented imaging, has partnered with Automattic, the company behind WordPress. The two organizations have jointly launched a new WordPress plugin – Link Fixer – which is designed to combat the scourge of ‘link rot’.
“Link rot” is an unfortunate phenomenon where online articles become littered with broken links—URLs that once led to active pages but now lead to error messages or dead ends. A 2024 Pew Research study showed that nearly 40% of the links that existed in 2013 were no longer active. Such “digital decay” occurs on a wide variety of websites, from news and government sites to Wikipedia pages to tweets.
Automattic says its new plug-in works by scanning your WordPress posts for outbound links and then cross-referencing the Wayback Machine for archived versions of those links. If there are none, it will automatically take new snapshots of the relevant articles. Should a linked website go offline, the new feature will then redirect readers to archived versions so there is no service outage. The tool also archives the user’s own posts, which helps ensure their longevity.
This tool is designed to keep website visitors reading the best version of the website available. Indeed, the Automattic plugin constantly checks links to websites, and if the original link that went offline is resurrected, the plugin will start redirecting users to the original page again instead of the archived version.
The Github write-up shows that the plugin’s controls are relatively easy to use and offer convenient customization. For example, users can specify how often they want the plug-in to check for link validity (the default setting offered by the program is every three days).