Broken Link Checker
Find dead links on any page.
Checked from our server. One location, so results show reachability from there only.
What the broken link checker does
Links break quietly. A partner site reorganises its pages, a product is discontinued, or someone mistypes an address in a menu, and visitors land on an error instead of the page they wanted. This checker reads one page, collects its links and requests each one from our server to see whether it still works.
It suits a quick check of a single page: a resources list, a blog post with many citations, a footer, or a landing page before a campaign goes out. Because it works on one page at a time, you don’t have to wait for a full site crawl.
How to use the broken link checker
- Paste the URL of the page to check.
- Press Check links. We read the page and test up to 50 of its links, five at a time, with a progress bar as we go.
- Broken links rise to the top of the table. Fix or remove them, then run the check again.
Reading the results
The counters along the top split the links into broken, working, redirects and ones we couldn’t tell about. Each row in the table shows the status, the link address, its link text and a detail column. A link counts as broken when it returns an error such as 404 or 500, when its domain doesn’t resolve, when there’s no response, or when its redirects loop or run too long. For links that redirect, the detail column shows where they end up, which is handy for updating them to the final address and saving visitors a hop.
We send a lightweight HEAD request first and fall back to a normal GET when a server doesn’t support HEAD. Links that answer 401, 403 or 429 are marked Refused us rather than broken, because many sites block automated requests while working fine for people. Treat those as “check by hand”. For a closer look at one address and its redirect chain, use the redirect checker.
Questions
Does it crawl my whole site?
No. It checks the links on the one page you enter, up to 50 of them.
Why do some links say “refused us”?
Sites with bot protection sometimes answer automated requests with 401, 403 or 429. Open those links in your browser to confirm.
Which links are skipped?
Links to private networks, in-page # anchors, mailto:, tel: and javascript: links, and anything else that isn’t http or https.
My page has more than 50 links. What happens?
We tell you how many links the page has and check the first 50 in page order. Each address is checked once, even if the page repeats it.