The Wayback Machine debuts a new plug-in designed to fix the internet’s broken links problem

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit that — as you might expect — is devoted to archiving the internet and preserving 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 in peak digital health.

The Archive’s Wayback Machine, which indexes the web through widespread snapshotting, has partnered with Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Together, the two organizations have launched a new WordPress plug-in — the Link Fixer — that is designed to combat the scourge of “link rot.”

“Link rot” is the unfortunate phenomenon whereby online articles become populated by broken links — URLs that once led to active pages but now result in error messages or dead ends. A Pew Research study from 2024 showed that nearly 40% of links that existed in 2013 were no longer active. Such “digital decay” occurs across a broad diversity of web pages, from news and government sites to Wikipedia pages to tweets.

Automattic says that its new plug-in works by scanning your WordPress posts for outbound links, then cross-referencing the Wayback Machine for archived versions of those links. If there are none, it will automatically take new snapshots of the articles in question. Should a linked web page go offline, the new feature will then redirect readers to the archived versions, so that there is no drop in service. The tool also archives a user’s own posts, helping to ensure their longevity.

The tool is designed to keep a site’s visitors reading the best available version of a web page. Indeed, Automattic’s plug-in perpetually checks a web page’s links, and if an original link that had gone offline is resurrected, the plug-in will start redirecting the user to that original page again instead of the archived version.

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