Broken Link Checker for YouTube

Description

Broken Link Checker for YouTube is a WordPress plugin that will automatically validate
YouTube embeds found in your published posts content using the official API.

It does this by extracting video IDs from each post and querying the YouTube
API to ensure those IDs are still valid. This is a MUST for any video
site that wants to retain their visitors and not annoy them with broken
content.

The truth is videos are uploaded and removed frequently – either by the user
or the site itself for usage violations. If this happens to a video you have
embedded on your site, your visitors are going to see broken content instead
of the video they expected. Don’t let that happen.

Quick Summary:

Screenshots

  • A sample scan report.

  • Difference between Broken Link Checker for YouTube and Video Link Checker

Installation

  1. Install the plugin through WordPress admin or upload the YouTube Link
    Checker
    directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
  3. Visit Tools -> YouTube Checker to run a Scan.

FAQ

I installed the plugin. Where is it?

You will find it under Tools -> YouTube Checker.

What are the statuses returned for broken YouTube embed links?

  • NOT FOUND – The video was not found on YouTube.
  • DELETED – The video is marked as deleted, but not removed from YouTube.
  • REJECTED – The video is marked as rejected for copyright violation, account
    termination, etc.
  • NOT EMBEDDABLE – The video is marked as only playable on YouTube, and
    embedding the video on other sites will not work.

Why this plugin over the other Broken Link Checker plugin?

Use this plugin for checking YouTube videos.

The other plugin only checks if the YouTube video exists or not.
On YouTube, a video still exists if its status is DELETED, REJECTED or NOT
EMBEDDABLE, and the other plugin will not report those as broken links.

The plugin times out. What can I do?

The plugin will scan and verify roughly 30 videos per second. If your max
execution time for PHP is 30 seconds it will timeout after roughly 900 videos.
If you need more than that, you can change your PHP runtime configuration for
max execution
time

or try the premium Video Link Checker, which has no timeouts under mod_php.

The plugin isn’t finding my videos! What now?

Verify those videos are in the post content. Some themes will store the video
in custom meta fields (Avada, Newspaper, Goodwork, Enfold, Sahifa, SimpleMag,
True Mag, Valenti, VideoTube, and Video Member to name a few). If so you can
use the premium Video Link Checker.

The plugin isn’t finding some videos that are blocked. Why not?

This case happens when the person who uploaded the video chose to allow the
video to be embedded, but the legal copyright holder of some content on the
video ( usually the music ) has the legal right to restrict or block the
embed. This info is currently not available through the YouTube API.

Where can I find the premium Video Link Checker?

You can find the Video Link
Checker
at CodeCanyon.

Reviews

14 April 2022
Does what it says. Scans on demand the posts and reports what is not embeddable and what's broken. Would be even more useful if it could run the scans from time to time automatically. Though there is such option in a paid version.
28 November 2021 1 reply
Doesn't Work Scanned 1556 posts. 0 videos checked (i have 200+ videos). 0 videos broken.
3 September 2016
Only checks posts and not pages, but it found a broken youtube link that was missed by the other broken linker checker I tried, and it's free, so I'm happy with it.
Read all 6 reviews

Contributors and Developers

“Broken Link Checker for YouTube” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Change Log

1.3 Released May 15th, 2023

  • Updated YouTube ToS.

1.2 Released February 27th, 2020

  • Fixed issue where YouTube API timeout or similar error would report videos as broken.

1.1.1 Released January 12th, 2015

  • Check for no eligible posts found to scan.

1.1 Released November 12th, 2015

  • Tweak for finding YouTube urls on their own line.
  • Tweak for embed shortcode url detection.

1.0 Released November 2nd, 2015

  • Initial Release