Broken Link Checker

A broken link checker crawls your website and reports the status of every page and link it finds, so you can catch dead links — 404s, broken redirects, pages that error out — before your visitors or Google run into them. On a site of any real size they’re impossible to find by hand, and left alone they frustrate readers, waste crawl budget and quietly bleed away link equity.

Most free checkers hand you a flat list of dead URLs and leave you to work out where each one lives. This one shows the exact page every broken link sits on, along with its anchor text, so you go straight to the fix. Results stream in live as each link is checked rather than appearing all at once after a long wait, and it keeps genuine 404s separate from redirects (shown with their hop count) and from firewall rejections — the 403s and 429s that many tools wrongly report as broken.

What the status codes actually mean

Every row in the report carries the real HTTP status the server returned. Most tools collapse these into “working” and “broken,” which is where the false alarms come from. Here is what each one means and whether it needs your attention.

What causes broken links

Links break for a handful of predictable reasons. You rename or delete a page without adding a redirect; you change your permalink or URL structure and thousands of old links suddenly point at addresses that no longer resolve; a typo slips into an href; or an external site you linked to moves, expires or takes its page down — something you can’t control but still pay for in user experience. Images, stylesheets and downloadable files break the same way. The larger and older a site gets, the more of these accumulate silently, which is why a periodic crawl matters far more than a one-off check.

How to fix a broken link

Once the crawl shows you what’s broken and where, the fix depends on why it broke.

Do broken links actually hurt your SEO?

Indirectly, and the honest answer is more nuanced than most posts admit. Google has said repeatedly that a 404 is a normal part of the web and having some will not incur a penalty. What broken links genuinely cost you is real, though: crawl budget spent on URLs that return nothing, internal link equity that dead-ends instead of flowing to pages that matter, and readers who hit a dead end and leave. That last one is the expensive part. Broken links are not a ranking factor so much as a symptom — a site with hundreds of them usually has a maintenance problem that shows up in other ways too.

Outbound broken links matter more than people expect. A page full of dead references reads as abandoned, and that is the impression it leaves with both readers and reviewers.

When to run a check

Internal versus external links

The report labels every row as internal or external, and the distinction changes what you can do about it. Internal breakage is always your fault and always fixable — a redirect or an edit closes it. External breakage is outside your control: the site moved, expired, or was sold. You still pay for it in reader experience, so it still needs handling, but the fix is replacement rather than repair.

Leave “Check external links too” ticked for a full picture. Untick it when you only want to audit your own structure, which is faster and produces a shorter list.

How this compares to other free checkers

We ran the same sites through the popular free alternatives before building this. These are the limits each one publishes, as of August 2026 — worth re-checking before you rely on them, since free tiers change often.

The pattern is consistent: free web-based checkers either cap you low enough that a real site never finishes, or they hand you a list of dead URLs with no indication of where each one lives. Finding the URL is the easy half. Finding the page it sits on is the work.

What this tool cannot do

Being straight about the gaps, because every crawler has them and most pages do not say so.

One honest note on how it runs: unlike most tools on ToolsVale, this one can’t run entirely in your browser. Browsers are blocked from fetching other websites’ pages for security reasons, so the crawl runs on our server, which requests each URL and streams the results straight back to you — nothing about your site is saved. The crawler identifies itself as ToolsVale-LinkChecker and spaces its requests, so a full crawl puts less load on your server than a handful of real visitors. If you run a strict firewall, allowlisting that user-agent will give you cleaner results.

WordPress, Search Console and this tool

If you run WordPress, the usual advice is to install a broken-link plugin, but the popular ones either add database load or cap the free tier at around 200 links a month. Google Search Console’s report is free and shows which pages link to a 404, but it only surfaces errors Google has already crawled, tops out at roughly a thousand pages, and can lag by up to a week. This tool sits between the two: it checks your live site from the outside on demand, with nothing to install, no monthly cap, up to 10,000 pages per run, and the source page shown for every broken link straight away.

The three are complementary rather than competing. Search Console tells you what Google has already tripped over — that is the authoritative view of what is hurting you in search. A plugin catches breakage as you create it, inside the editor. This tool gives you the full current picture of your live site, on demand, without waiting for Google to re-crawl or asking your database to do the work.

Reading your report

The report opens on the Broken tab, because that is what you came for. From there:

• Found on is the column that matters — it links to the page the dead link sits on and quotes the anchor text, so you can search for it directly in your editor.
• The summary cards are filters. Click Blocked to sanity-check the false alarms before you start fixing anything.
• The redirect arrow shows the hop count. Anything above one is a chain worth shortening.
• Export before you start. The CSV and Excel files carry the source page and anchor text for every row, which makes a workable fix-list for a developer or a client.
• Sort by frequency, not by row. One bad URL repeated across a template appears many times but is a single fix.

Cleaning up your technical SEO end to end? The XML Sitemap Generator lists the pages search engines should crawl, the robots.txt Generator controls what they’re allowed to crawl, the Schema Markup Generator adds the structured data that earns rich results, and the llms.txt Generator does the same job for AI answer engines.