Broken links hurt your SEO, frustrate visitors, and waste your crawl budget. Finding them does not have to be difficult. Here are 9 methods to check for broken links, ranging from free online tools to advanced techniques.
The quickest way is a dedicated tool. Enter your URL and it scans every link on your site, reporting which ones return 404, 500, or other errors. Broken Link Checker Online is free and checks up to 1,000 links per scan.
Google Search Console shows which pages Googlebot found returning errors. Check Coverage > Excluded > 404. This gives you Google view of your broken links.
Extensions like Check My Links (Chrome) highlight broken links on any page you visit. Good for quick checks but limited to one page at a time.
A desktop tool that crawls your entire site. Free for up to 500 URLs. Shows every link, its status code, and the source page. Powerful but requires installation.
Free online validator from W3C. Checks all links on a page or domain. It is thorough but slower than dedicated tools.
Click every link on your site by hand. Time-consuming but gives you firsthand experience of your user journey. Best for small sites under 50 pages.
Look at pages with high exit rates. Visitors leaving quickly may have encountered broken links. Cross-reference with your scan results.
Check your server access logs for 404 responses. If a URL returns many 404s and you never had that page, it is an external site linking to a broken page on your domain.
Run scans on a schedule. Our tool offers automated daily and weekly scans that email you reports when new broken links are found. Catch issues before Google does.
For a one-time clean up: use method 1 (online checker). For ongoing maintenance: combine method 1 with method 9 (weekly monitoring). For SEO audits: add method 2 (Search Console) and method 4 (Screaming Frog).
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