Waymender – Broken Link Checker, 404 Monitor & Redirects

No. Scans run in the background in small batches with a delay between link checks on the same domain, and the batch size adapts to how fast your server answers. Working links are cached for seven days and not re-requested.

The destination refuses automated requests (LinkedIn, Instagram, Cloudflare challenges…). Waymender does not pretend to know; it lists these separately so you can check them by hand. A link that answers 429 (rate limited) or 503 (temporarily unavailable) is listed as blocked too, but it is checked again automatically: the hourly re-check picks it up once the site's Retry-After time has passed (never sooner than 5 minutes or later than 7 days), or after 3 hours when the site sends no Retry-After. Its status line says when, for example "HTTP 429 (rate limited, rechecks after 3h)".

Yes. Elementor, Bricks and Beaver Builder data is read from post meta (Settings → What to scan → "Page builder data stored in post meta"). Divi and WPBakery shortcodes live in the post content and are read with it: every attribute whose name ends in url, src, image, link, href or logo, plus Divi's src_webm, audio, background_video_mp4 and background_video_webm and WPBakery's custom_links (a comma- or newline-separated list, also when WPBakery stores it #E-8_-encoded). WPBakery's encoded link format (url:…|title:…) is read too. Numeric image attributes are attachment IDs, not URLs, and are not checked. Divi's _et_pb_old_content backup of the pre-builder content is not scanned, because the page does not show it. For Elementor, Bricks and Beaver Builder, fixes are written into the stored builder data: Edit URL, Use archived copy and Replace image put the new address in place of the old one wherever it appears in that page's builder data, and Unlink and Remove empty it there. For Divi and WPBakery, Edit URL, Use archived copy and Replace image rewrite the URL inside that one shortcode attribute (WPBakery links keep their title and target; in a custom_links list only that entry changes, and an encoded list stays encoded); Unlink and Remove are refused with a message, because taking a link or image out of a builder element has to be done in the page builder. Page-builder links keep their rel attribute; no nofollow is added. After a fix, the builder's generated CSS/asset cache is cleared for Elementor, Beaver Builder and Divi through their own functions. Waymender does not clear Bricks' generated files.

If Redirection is active and Settings → Redirects → Redirect engine is on "Automatic" (the default), every redirect you create, edit, switch off or delete in Waymender is written to a Redirection group called "Waymender", and Waymender stops serving redirects itself, so each rule runs exactly once. Rules you made before Redirection was activated can be copied across with one button on the Redirects screen. Wildcard rules become Redirection regular-expression rules. Choose "Always on" to serve redirects from Waymender instead, or "Off" to switch its redirects off entirely. When you switch from "Automatic" to "Always on" or "Off" while Redirection is active, Waymender deletes the redirects it wrote to Redirection (rules you made in Redirection itself are not touched), so no rule is served twice or left behind there. Switch back to "Automatic" and the Redirects screen shows the "Copy N existing redirects to Redirection" button again, N being the number of rules waiting to be copied.

No. Waymender has no server of its own and sends no usage statistics or telemetry. It contacts nothing until you start a scan, and then only the addresses listed under "External services" above: the sites your own content links to, one WordPress.org request if a check fails with a DNS error, and the Internet Archive when you ask for an archived replacement.

No. Waymender loads Action Scheduler 3.9.3 from lib/action-scheduler/. Action Scheduler is built for this: each copy registers its version with ActionScheduler_Versions behind function_exists() and class_exists() guards, and only the newest copy on the site boots. WooCommerce and other plugins that bundle it share the same mechanism.

The admin app and the editor integration ship un-minified in assets/src/; the files in assets/build/ are produced from them with npm install && npm run build (the package.json is included). The bundled Action Scheduler library in lib/ is unmodified upstream code under its own GPL licence. Nothing else is compiled or obfuscated.

Anyone who can edit a post can fix the links in that post's content and excerpt (Edit URL, Use archived copy, Replace image, Unlink and Remove) and dismiss them. The editor sidebar lists the post's problem links and offers Unlink and Remove; the plugin's REST route for a single fix (POST /wp-json/waymender/v1/fix/<id>) accepts the other fixes from the same users. Fixing links anywhere else (custom fields, page-builder data, menus, widgets, term descriptions, comments), fixing every occurrence of a URL at once, creating a redirect, and the Links, 404 log and Redirects screens need the manage_options capability (administrators by default). Every one of these checks goes through the waymender_capability filter, which receives a context: rest for the fix and other REST routes, redirects for creating redirects and the Redirects screen, and menu for the admin menu.