Broken Link Checker

What it costs you when this is wrong

• One dead footer link, a 404 on every page

  Headers and footers are shared, so a single dead href in your navigation is a dead end on every page of the site. The people who hit it are the ones looking for contact, pricing or delivery - the pages visitors go to when they are close to buying.

• The links you never click yourself

  Your own team uses the same five pages every day. The ones that rot are the supplier reference, the PDF price list, the booking URL and the citation in a three-year-old post. They fail on someone else's server, so nothing shows up in your own logs.

• Search engines find it before you do

  A crawler follows the same dead link and spends a fetch on a page that does not exist, and anything reachable only through that link stops being reached at all. You usually learn about it weeks later from a coverage report in Search Console, long after visitors started hitting the same dead end.

Why run it here

• Only two statuses can be called broken

  404 and 410 count as broken and nothing else does: a connection that never completed, a server that refuses the lightweight request tried first, and any status the checker does not recognise are all filed as unverified. The default is to say we could not tell, rather than to put a defect on your page.

• A pass says how much it covered

  Every result carries the number of links checked and the number not checked, and states whether the per-scan cap or the time budget was the reason. If nothing could be checked at all, the report stays silent rather than showing three passes earned by checking none.

• One layer of a 986-rule audit

  The same run also checks the markup around your links - hrefs that are empty, hrefs that only work once JavaScript has run, pages with almost no internal links out. Every finding cites its source, here RFC 9110 for the status codes and Google's own guidance on crawlable links.

This check runs on its own here, and as part of the full audit alongside the other 985 rules. Either way the findings carry their evidence and their citation, and the report is never published or kept.

1. 1

   Fix genuine 404s by correcting the URL or restoring the page. These are the ones costing you visitors and crawl budget.

2. 2

   Replace links to permanently moved pages with the final destination rather than relying on the redirect, so link equity is not lost to a chain.

3. 3

   Update http:// links to https:// where the target supports it, to avoid an unnecessary redirect on every click.

4. 4

   Treat 403 and 429 responses with scepticism — many large sites refuse automated requests, and the link works perfectly in a browser. Verify by hand before removing it.

5. 5

   Re-check after any site migration or CMS change, which is when most link rot is introduced at once.

1. 1

   Enter your address

   Just the domain is enough — example.com, with or without the https. No account, no card, no crawl of your whole site.

2. 2

   We render it like a visitor

   Your page opens in a real browser and JavaScript runs to completion, so what gets audited is the page a person actually sees — not the raw HTML your server sent. A screenshot comes back with the report as evidence of exactly what we measured.

3. 3

   You get findings you can act on

   Up to 986 checks run against that rendered page. Each finding names the rule, quotes the evidence found on your page, cites the public specification behind it, and says what to change. Nothing is a judgement call — run it twice on an unchanged page and the score is identical.

What runs this check

• Live HTTP link resolution

Named because provenance is the product. Every finding in your report says which of these produced it, so you can check the reasoning rather than take a score on faith.

Also checks

This page answers these searches too — they are the same job, so they share one page rather than being split across near-identical ones:

• dead link checker
• 404 checker
• link validator
• check broken links

Other checkers

• HTML ValidatorW3C markup conformance, checked by a real parser
• CSS ValidatorStylesheets parsed and checked against the W3C property grammars
• Schema Markup ValidatorJSON-LD parsed, expanded to real schema.org IRIs, and checked
• Rich Results TestWhich search features your structured data qualifies for
• Website Scam DetectorThe trust signals people and payment processors check before believing a site
• AI ValidatorWhether AI models can find, read, quote and operate your site
• SEO CheckerTitles, meta, canonicals, indexability and internal linking
• Accessibility CheckerTwo WCAG engines — one in a real browser, one on your markup
• Security Headers CheckerResponse headers, CSP quality, and the TLS certificate underneath
• Core Web Vitals CheckerMeasured for real, plus the page-weight causes behind the numbers
• AI Agent Readiness CheckerCan an agent find your buttons, read your labels and finish the task
• W3C ValidatorMarkup and stylesheet conformance in one pass
• Answer Engine CheckerWhether AI answer engines can quote you, and attribute it
• AI Crawler CheckerWhich AI crawlers your robots.txt actually lets in
• SSL Certificate CheckerA real handshake: certificate, expiry, protocol and cipher
• robots.txt CheckerWhat your robots.txt actually allows, group by group
• Meta Tag CheckerTitles, descriptions, canonicals and robots directives
• Open Graph CheckerHow your link looks when someone shares it
• Image SEO CheckerAlt text, dimensions, formats and lazy loading
• Mobile-Friendly TestViewport, tap targets and responsive behaviour
• Website CheckerEvery module, one scan, one prioritised fix list