Hate Dead Links? The Wayback Machine Has the WordPress Plug-In for You

If you’ve spent enough time on the internet, you’ve probably experienced the frustration of clicking broken links to websites long since taken down, and the problem is only likely to get worse as the internet continues to age. Almost four in ten webpages—38%—that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible a decade later, according to the Pew Research Center.

Now, the Internet Archive is rolling out a more intuitive way for website owners to combat the problem, in collaboration with website hosting service WordPress, which is used by around 40% of websites.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine Link Fixer automatically combats link rot by redirecting users to a working archived version of a page when it encounters a dead link. When the plug-in is added to a website, it scans existing pages and automatically queues them to be archived. If a page hasn’t already been saved, it is then sent for capture and preservation.

“We need to have an accurate memory of the things that get said, posted, and the ways that we have communicated over time,” said Alexander Rose, Director of Long-term Futures for Automattic Inc., the company that owns WordPress.

Rose argues that we are “increasingly using [the web] as our only source of truth.”

He added: “When links go dead, in effect, the truth goes dead. This has become even more important in the world of AI.”

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The tool is currently available to download on the official WordPress.org plugin directory. The tool’s rollout comes as the platform has been racking up some big milestones recently. On October 22, 2025, the Internet Archive celebrated 1 trillion web pages preserved and made available for access via the Wayback Machine, roughly 20 years after it first launched.

The platform has also been facing its fair share of legal challenges over the past few years. In September 2024, the federal appeals court ruled against the Internet Archive, siding with a group of publishers that sued to stop the nonprofit’s loaning e-books generated by scanning print editions, a practice known as “Controlled Digital Lending” (CDL).