Broken Link Checker

What Are Broken Links and Why Do They Matter?

A broken link is any hyperlink on your website that leads to a page that no longer exists. Click it and you get a 404 error, a timeout, or some other failure instead of the content you expected. They're also called dead links or link rot, and every website accumulates them over time.

Here's why they matter: Google crawls your site by following links. When Googlebot hits a dead link, it wastes crawl budget on a page that doesn't exist. Do that enough times and Google starts crawling your site less frequently. Meanwhile, visitors who click broken links bounce immediately — that's a terrible user experience and a signal to search engines that your site isn't well maintained.

Our broken link checker crawls your pages, follows every link, and reports back which ones are dead. You can scan a single page or your entire website — up to 2,000 URLs in one go. Fix the broken ones, and you've just improved both your SEO and your visitor experience in one shot.

How Broken Links Hurt Your SEO

Wasted Crawl Budget

Google allocates a certain amount of crawl budget to your site — basically how many pages it'll check in a given time period. Every time Googlebot follows a link to a 404 page, that's a wasted crawl. On small sites this doesn't matter much. But if you have thousands of pages and hundreds of broken links, you're burning through crawl budget on dead ends instead of letting Google discover your actual content.

Lost Link Equity

When external sites link to a page on your domain that no longer exists, all that link equity (ranking power) goes nowhere. It's like getting a recommendation letter that's addressed to the wrong person — the value is there but it can't be used. The fix is simple: find those broken URLs and add 301 redirects pointing to the correct pages. Our tool finds the broken links; the bulk redirect checker helps you verify the fixes.

Poor User Experience

Nothing kills trust faster than clicking a link and landing on a 404 page. Visitors don't know if your site is abandoned, if the content was removed, or if something is broken. Most of them just leave. High bounce rates from broken links send negative signals to search engines about your site quality.

What Causes Broken Links?

Broken links don't appear out of nowhere. Here are the most common causes:

Deleted or moved pages without redirects. Someone removes a blog post or changes a URL slug without setting up a redirect. Every internal and external link pointing to that old URL is now broken. This is the number one cause of dead links on most websites.

Typos in URLs. A content editor manually types a link and misspells the path. The page exists at /services but the link points to /servics. These are easy to miss during content review but show up immediately in a scan.

External sites going down. You link to a resource on another website, and months later that site shuts down or restructures. You have no control over this, but you're still sending your visitors to a dead page. Regular scans catch these so you can update or remove the links.

CMS updates and migrations. Switching themes, updating plugins, or migrating to a new CMS can break internal links if URL structures change. Always run a full site scan after any major CMS change.

Changed file paths. Images, PDFs, and downloadable files that get moved to a new directory without updating the links that reference them. These are technically broken links too, even though they're not pages.

How to Use the Broken Link Checker

Two scanning modes, depending on what you need:

Single Page scan — enter a URL and the tool checks every link on that specific page. It finds all the <a href> tags, follows each one, and reports which ones return errors. Good for checking a specific landing page or blog post after editing. Handles up to 500 links per page.

Whole Website scan — enter your domain and the tool crawls your entire site, following internal links from page to page. It checks up to 2,000 URLs and reports every broken link it finds along with the source page where the link appears. This is what you want for a full site audit.

Both modes show results in real-time as the scan progresses. You can pause and resume at any point, and export the full report to CSV when done. The report includes the broken URL, the HTTP status code, and the anchor text of the link — so you know exactly where to find it and fix it.

How to Fix Broken Links

Once you have your list of dead links, here's the decision tree:

If the content moved to a new URL — set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. This preserves any link equity and sends visitors to the right place. Use our redirect checker to verify the redirect works correctly after you set it up.

If the content was intentionally removed — either redirect to the most relevant existing page, or update the links pointing to it. If it's an internal link, just change the href to point somewhere useful. If external sites link to it and the page had value, redirect to the closest equivalent.

If it's a typo — fix the link. Simple as that. Update the href in your CMS and the broken link disappears.

If it's an external link you can't control — either find an alternative resource to link to, use the Wayback Machine to find an archived version, or remove the link entirely. Don't leave dead external links on your site.

How Often Should You Check for Broken Links?

It depends on how often your site changes:

• High-traffic sites with frequent updates (news sites, e-commerce, blogs with daily posts) — check weekly. Content changes fast and links break fast.
• Business sites with regular updates (SaaS, agencies, portfolios) — check monthly. Enough to catch problems before they accumulate.
• Static sites that rarely change — check quarterly. External links still break over time even if your content doesn't change.
• After any major change — always run a scan after a CMS update, theme change, migration, or bulk content edit. Don't wait for the next scheduled check.

Broken Links vs Redirect Errors

Not all link problems are 404s. Sometimes a link technically "works" but goes through a messy redirect chain or lands on the wrong page. Our broken link checker catches the hard failures (404, 500, timeouts). For redirect-specific issues like chains, loops, and wrong status codes, use our bulk redirect checker to trace the full path of each URL.

The two tools work together: the broken link checker finds dead links, and the redirect checker helps you verify that your fixes (301 redirects) are working correctly. For a complete site health picture, also check your robots.txt to make sure you're not accidentally blocking crawlers from important pages.

Every website has broken links. The question is whether you find them before your visitors and Google do. Run a scan with our broken link checker above — paste a URL, choose single page or whole site, and get a complete report of every dead link in minutes. Fix them, and you've just improved your crawl efficiency, preserved your link equity, and given your visitors a better experience. That's SEO and UX in one move.