Free broken link checker
What a broken link actually costs
- Readers leave: a dead link in the middle of a how-to is where someone stops following it.
- Search engines notice: broken internal links waste crawl budget and break the paths that carry authority between your pages. Links out to sites that have gone are a quality signal too.
- They accumulate quietly: nobody breaks a link on purpose. A rename, a migration, a partner who shut down — and no one finds out until a customer says so.
A 404 that answers 200 is still a dead end
Plenty of sites answer a missing page with a friendly 200 and the words “page not found”. A checker that only looks at status codes calls that healthy, and it is not — it is a soft 404, and search engines treat it as one. This looks for the tells: a page whose content says it is missing, whatever its status claims.
| What came back | What it means |
|---|---|
| 404 or 410 | The page is gone. Fix the link or remove it. |
| 200 saying “not found” | A soft 404 — as broken as the above, and harder to spot. |
| 500 or a dropped connection | The other end is broken, not your link. Worth re-checking before you act. |
| 403 or a challenge page | The site refused an anonymous request. Your link is probably fine; a reader with a browser would get through. |
One page here, every page with a crawl
The free tool checks the links on the single page you give it — up to twenty of them, internal and external alike. That is enough to test an article, a landing page or a footer.
A site is a different job: a crawl walks every page, records which pages link to each broken URL — so you know where to go and fix it — and separates the 404s from the pages that merely blocked the crawler. Schedule it weekly and new breakages are reported as they appear, rather than found later by someone who was trying to buy something.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find broken links on my website?
Check a page here for an immediate answer. For the whole site, run a crawl: it lists every 404 and soft 404 with the pages that link to them, and can re-check every week on a schedule.
Does it check external links as well as internal ones?
Yes. Every link on the page is checked, whichever host it points at — a link to a site that has closed is exactly the kind you want to hear about.
What is a soft 404?
A page that answers 200 OK while telling the reader it does not exist. Search engines treat it as a missing page; status-code checkers miss it entirely. This looks at the content as well as the code.
How often should I check for broken links?
After every release, and weekly in between. Most breakages arrive with a content change or a migration, so checking on a schedule catches them within days rather than quarters.
Why does the free tool only check twenty links?
Because it is free, anonymous and fetches on demand. An account lifts the ceiling and, more usefully, turns it into a crawl that checks every page rather than one.
Find them before your visitors do
One page now, or every page every week.