What makes broken links so problematical is that they are caused slowly, over time and mostly affect older content – things that you can easily forget about. Unfortunately, this older content has the higher page rank in your site, so having broken links in old content costs you a lot.

The classic solution for combating broken links is to periodically scan the entire site’s content, find and fix them.

Plugins such as Broken Links Checker do this well, including automated checks and reports.

Warning: Broken Links Checks isn’t compatible with WPML, as it does low-level DB operations which break language information.

Preventing broken links instead of fixing them

WPML includes its own solution for broken links. It’s called ‘Sticky Links‘. Sticky Links make all links between your content dynamic, so that the link follows the target whereever it goes.

Sticky Links properties:

• Always link too the current permalinks
• Update in real-time, with no need to scan and fix
• Track pages by their IDs instead of their URLs
• Resilient to settings changes, such as permalinks structure

Supposing you have a page called ‘New PC offer’. You’ve placed that page in example.com/new-pc-offer/ and are linking to it.

Now, that offer has moved and its name also changed (because it’s not that new anymore). This same page is now example.com/offers/pc31/. You still want the incoming links to go to that page, although it has a new URL now.

When Sticky Links are enabled, all pages linking to that page will immediately link to the correct URL. It’s because, in the database, the link doesn’t go to the URL. Instead, it goes to the abstract page. The actual link is calculated when the page is displayed, so it always returns the correct URL.

A Broken Links Checker would also find this, but it’s going to be way longer and more complicated. You would get an alert that something is wrong, locate the new page and fix the link yourself.

With Sticky Links, all this goes automatically.

This video shows it in action:

Site languages versus admin language

WPML allows WordPress sites to run in different languages. This means that one language becomes the default language and other languages are added. So far, nothing new.

By default the default site language is also the admin language.

Without WPML, you can set the site’s language by setting the WPLANG variable in wp-config.php. When WPML is enabled, the WPLANG variable is ignored. Instead, WPML sets the site’s languages.

Visitors see the language according to the page they’re viewing. Admins can choose in which language to administrate WordPress. The default is to have the same language, but it can be changed.

Choosing a different Admin language

First, you need to put WPML into Advanced mode. To do this, click on Go Advanced at the top of any page in WPML’s menu.

Go to WPML->Languages. Then, scroll down to where it says Admin language.

Default admin language setting

You can choose any of the site’s languages there. Once set, WordPress admin pages will appear in that language, unless users select a different language for themselves (up next).

Individual admin language per user

If you’re running a multilingual site, it’s very likely that different authors would like to see things in different languages. WPML makes that possible.

Each user should go to the profile page (Users->Your profile). Scroll to the bottom to where it says WPML language settings. There are several settings there and right now, we’re interested in the admin language.

Look at where it says Select your language. The default value is to use the default admin language (which we just set before).

Admin language for each user

This setting is per user and whatever each user selects here doesn’t influence other users. Any user can select the admin language, which overrides the default values.

Making WordPress display correctly for each language

In order for WordPress to display correctly in different languages, you need to have the localization files installed and the correct locale selected per language.

WPML comes with default locales for most languages, but you need to install the localization files for WordPress.

To do this, go to WPML->Theme and plugins localization.

You can choose one of the two options, to use .mo files to translation by WPML. When you will see a table with locale values per language. This table will already include the correct locales, as WPML determines, but you can edit it.

Locale settings per language

WPML shows you if the .mo file for WordPress exists in the wp-includes/languages folder. If it says File exists, it means that WordPress admin will display in the correct language. Otherwise, you need to make sure that the .mo file is in place and that the locale code (Code field) is correct.

Despite their similar (and confusing) name, they have nothing to do with WordPress Sticky Posts and Pages.

What Sticky Links do

Let’s start with an example:

Supposing there are just two pages in our website – a Home page and a page called Space Whiz (our latest and greatest and only product). From Home there’s a link to Space Whiz. We’re using fancy URLs so its address is:

oursite.com/space-whiz/

Space Whiz is doing great so we’re writing a sequel – Space Attack. We’re creating a new Products page, making it the parent page of both our programs. So now, we have:

oursite.com/products/
oursite.com/products/space-attack/
oursite.com/products/space-whiz/

What’s going to happen to our home page link that points to oursite.com/space-whiz/?

It’s pointing at the wrong place. The URL for that page is changing to oursite.com/products/space-whiz/ (WordPress cleverly redirects to the new URL, but this is done based on guesswork. I can tell you more about it if you’re interested).

Wouldn’t it be nice if that home page link magically updated to the correct URL?

This is exactly what Sticky Links do.

When Sticky Links are enabled, all internal links between pages and posts update automatically when their URLs change. If a page’s URL (permalink) changes, all links to it will update instantly.

This might illustrate it a bit better.

Without Sticky Links

Before	After

With Sticky Links

Before	After

Have you ever done drawings in MS Word (or OpenOffice)? To connect objects, you can either draw lines or place connectors. Lines just point somewhere. Connectors point to objects. When the objects move, connectors follow. Lines just keep pointing to where the objects used to be.

WPML’s Sticky Links are like connectors. They track where pages go and follow them – hence the name.

How WPML’s Sticky Links work

With Sticky Links enabled, WPML does two things:

1. When posts and pages are saved it changes all URLs to Sticky.
2. When pages are displayed it calculates the actual URLs for links.

Links turned Sticky by SitePress

When you save a page or a post, WPML checks for links to other pages or posts. It replaces all such links with default style links. Instead of saving <a href=”http://oursite.com/space-whiz/”>, it will save <a href=”/?page_id=5″> (or whatever the page ID is). This is the default style URL.

Then, when the page is displayed, WPML replaces back all the links to their current URLs. When the Space Wiz URL is http://oursite.com/space-whiz/, this is what you’ll get. When it changes, the links in all pages update immediately.

Enabling and disabling Sticky Links

WPML makes it easy to start and stop using Sticky Links. The Sticky Links admin screen can scan all existing contents and convert ordinary links into Sticky. In so doing, it will also warn you about broken links and suggest possible alternatives.

If you don’t want to use Sticky Links any more, you can revert them to the current permalinks. WPML will run through all pages on posts in the database and change the links back.

Do visitors see any of this?

No. It’s all internal. Visitors will always see the current permalinks in links. The Sticky Links are only visible when you edit pages. Then, you will see the default WordPress links instead of fancy links.

When visitors view your pages (or when you preview them), it’s all fancy links.

What happens if I decide to change the permalink structure?

Great question! I’m glad you asked that.

This is where Sticky Links really shine. You can change the permalink structure ten times a day and nothing will break. Since the links between pages are calculated when pages are displayed, all the links between pages and posts will always be correct – no matter what you change.

Any feedback?

I hope this explains WPML’s Sticky Links better. What do you think about this? Do you find it a useful feature? Any ideas for improvements?