Check website for broken links

Let’s face it, broken links suck! They suck the usability out of a website into a 404 black hole, they suck the patience out of users with “oh, I found what I was looking for! … no, I didn’t” and they suck the life out of webmasters who have to play dead link whac-a-mole. So, are there any broken link checkers?

Unsurprisingly, yes! There are a lot of ready-made solutions out there.

And why reinvent the wheel right? What could suck more than clicking every single link, on every single page, every single day to check if everything is still ok.

Web-based tools offer great advantages, namely the ability to use them on the go and not having to install anything, but do they do the job? A quick run-through of some of the options.

The name at least sounds promising; two steps to use:

  1. Fill in the URL
  2. Fill one of those ugly captchas that need three attempts to get right

The free edition only scans one page and it must be the top level domain, and to order the service it requests an email to be sent for a quote… What is this? The 90’s?

No thanks.

Better looking website, looks like at least they know which year they are in.

Similar steps again, fill in the URL and tick the “I am not a robot” checkbox.

And nothing happens… maybe it’s thinking about it, even though it hasn’t said that it’s going to think about it. Go for a coffee, come back, and still nothing other than a dull “No data found” message. Maybe I did something wrong, but it shouldn’t be this hard even if so.

Next.

Not great on the looks front, but looks can be deceiving (they say).

Let’s go again, type in the URL, enter the captcha and watch it spin through URLs. It even gives the option to scan the whole website or just a single page.

So whoever said that looks are deceiving was right! Does exactly what it’s supposed to, runs a scan through the full website, and returns a report of broken links. These include the status code, full URL of the broken link, and which page was it linked from.

Does the job!

This one claims that “Broken links are bad for business.” No question about that!

Simple to use, just enter the URL to check and hit the “Start check” button, no death by captcha on this one.

Does a really good job! The scan runs quite quickly and returns a very well formatted report. It returns a sum of links with issues and issue types, you can then drill down to the issues and see the results with the originating page. It also allows the results to be exported to PDF or CSV which is handy to do some automation around it.

Free scan is limited to 1,500 links per website which sounds fair. The paid subscription also includes support for recurring scans.

Recommended!