At the moment, the linkcheck plugin uses jtidy and xpath for retreiving all links. IMHO regexps would work much faster/better than jtidy-xpath combination. The following regexp would be a replacement for the xpath expressions: <(?>link|a|img|script)[^>]*?(?>href|src)\s*?=\s*?[\"'](.?)[\"'][^>]? All tests pass with this regexp and in project ws-jaxme I am getting these results for maven-linkcheck-plugin:clearcache maven-linkcheck-plugin:report-real: with jtidy/xpath: Total time: 2 minutes 43 seconds with regexps: Total time: 1 minutes 10 seconds I am sure some regexp guru can improve the performance of this. I have a question, though. Are mailto links supposed to count as checkable? IMO no. PD: Also, IMO the createDocument method from LinkCheck should be on a try finally block.