Broken Links Checker

Network & Web

Free
No Download/Install required
No registration

https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/broken-links.php

Provide your site base URL, and this tool will crawl your site and report all internal and external broken links it will find on all your pages.

It is slow on big sites, but at least in our tests, it has indeed detected broken links that other tools did not report. It will require you to leave your browser on that page while fetching the results.

In case of a broken link, it will provide the link, your page where the link is located, and the server response type (404, 503 ….)

Tip: in our own tests with this tool, we had some false positive “broken” links when the remote site was using a CDN blocking the tool bot. So double-check.

It is complementary to Google Search Console or similar tools.

Up to 3000 links, there is no registration nor fee required. Just no export of the results in the Free version (but copy/paste…)

Disciplines: SEO, Web development, Content management, Digital marketing, Web administration.

Free alternative to Screaming Frog, W3C Link Checker.

Broken Links Checker compared with Screaming Frog and W3C Link Checker
Broken Links Checker (brokenlinkcheck.com)	Screaming Frog SEO Spider	W3C Link Checker
Method and scope: You give the base URL and it crawls the site, reporting broken internal and external links on all pages it finds. It can be slow on large sites, and the browser must stay open on the page during the run.	Method and scope: A desktop crawler that finds 404 errors and server errors across a site. It also audits many other on-page SEO issues.	Method and scope: It reads an HTML or XHTML document and verifies that links and fragments resolve, that no anchor is defined twice, and warns about redirects. Recursive checking is available with a depth setting.
Limits and cost: Up to 3,000 links are checked without registration or fee. The free version has no result export.	Limits and cost: The free version crawls up to 500 URLs. The paid licence removes that limit, the maximum then depending on allocated memory and storage.	Limits and cost: It is open source under the W3C Software License. By default it waits 1 second between requests to each server, which is also the minimum.
Platform and installation: It runs in the browser, so nothing is installed.	Platform and installation: It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.	Platform and installation: It is a command-line program or CGI script, installed from CPAN. The listed release is version 5.0.0 of June 2021.
Results and caveats: Each broken link is listed with the page that contains it and the server response, such as 404 or 503. False positives occurred when a remote site used a CDN that blocked the bot, so double-check. It complements Google Search Console.	Results and caveats: Errors can be exported together with their source URLs. Exports can also be scheduled or run from the command line.	Results and caveats: Warnings cover HTTP redirects, including directory redirects. The request timeout defaults to 30 seconds.

Topics covered: Broken Links, Checker Tool, Internal Links, External Links, Crawl, Server Response, 404 Error, 503 Error, CDN, False Positives, Google Search Console, Site Audit, URL, Web Crawler, Link Validation, HTTP Status Codes, Data Fetching, ISO 9126, ISO 25010, ISO 27001, and ISO 9001..