Broken Link Checker
A link checker follows every link on a page and reports the ones that do not lead anywhere. What it reports, what each failure means, and which ones are worth your afternoon.
The free one-time checker is not open yet
TagPipes is finishing continuous broken link monitoring, and the free one-off checker will follow it. We would rather say that plainly than put a button here that does nothing. If you want to be told when it opens, there is a form further down this page.
The free check that is open today is the Website Accessibility Checker: paste a URL, get a report in a few minutes, no signup.
What a link check actually is
It is simpler than it sounds. A checker reads a page, collects every address the page links to, and then asks each of those addresses whether it is there. The answer comes back as a status code, or as a failure to answer at all, and everything a checker tells you is an interpretation of those two things.
The interesting part is not the request. It is the decisions around it: whether to follow redirects and how many, whether to check links that leave your site, how long to wait before calling something dead, and what to do when a site answers differently for a robot than for a person. Two checkers pointed at the same page will disagree, and almost always for one of those reasons.
What a checker cannot tell you is whether a link is wrong. A link that returns a perfectly healthy 200 and points at the wrong page is invisible to every tool on this list. Broken links are the subset of link problems that a machine can see.
What the result actually means
Not everything a checker flags is broken, and not everything broken gets flagged.
| What comes back | What it usually means | Worth fixing? |
|---|---|---|
| 404 Not Found | The server is there, the page is not. A deleted post, a renamed URL, a typo in the link | Yes. This is the main event |
| 410 Gone | The page was deliberately removed and is not coming back | Yes, but differently: the destination is not the mistake, linking to it is |
| 500 or 503 | The destination is broken or overloaded right now, not necessarily missing | Check again before acting. A single failed check is not evidence |
| 301 or 302 redirect | The link works, through a detour. A chain of several is slow and loses parameters | Sometimes. Update the link to point at the final destination |
| 403 Forbidden | The server refused. Often it refuses robots specifically, and works fine in a browser | Usually not. Open it yourself before believing the tool |
| No answer at all | DNS failure, a dead host, or a timeout. Common on outbound links to sites that have quietly ended | Yes, once you have confirmed it is not a slow response |
| 200 OK, wrong page | A soft 404: the page is gone but the site returns a friendly not-found page with a success code | Yes, and no checker will find it for you |
A single failed request is a symptom, not a diagnosis. The difference between a checker and a monitor is largely that a monitor has seen the same link succeed and fail over time and can tell you which one this is.
What to fix first
A first scan of a real site usually returns more findings than anyone will ever action. Order matters more than completeness.
1. Broken links on pages that make money
A dead link in the footer of a blog post from 2019 costs nothing. A dead link in the checkout flow, the pricing page or the main navigation costs something every hour it stays. Sort by where the link is, not by how loudly the tool complains.
2. Internal links to your own missing pages
These are entirely your fault and entirely within your control, which makes them the cheapest to fix. They usually come in clusters from one rename or one migration, so fixing the cause fixes twenty findings at once.
3. Links in things you cannot edit later
A broken link in an email that has already gone out, in a PDF, or behind a printed QR code cannot be fixed at the link. It has to be fixed at the destination, with a redirect. Find these first because they take longest.
4. Outbound links, last and in batches
Links to other people's sites break constantly and through no fault of yours. They are worth cleaning periodically, not urgently, and they are the strongest argument for checking on a schedule rather than in a panic.
A one-time check against continuous monitoring
They answer different questions, and most teams eventually want both.
A one-time check tells you
- Which links on this page, or this site, are failing right now
- How big the problem is, which is what you need before you can argue for time to fix it
- Whether a migration you just did broke anything obvious
- What a specific page looks like before you publish it
Only monitoring tells you
- That a link which worked last week has started failing
- Which links broke since the last check, as opposed to the whole list again
- That something you fixed is genuinely fixed, and has stayed fixed
- That an outbound link died quietly, months after you last thought about that page
Automated testing does not replace a manual accessibility review.
Frequently asked questions
Tell me when the link checker opens
One email when the free checker and the monitor are open to use. Nothing else, and no newsletter.
More on broken links
The same subject from the angle you came with, and the recurring version of the check.
- Website Broken Link CheckerChecking a whole site: where broken links come from and how often to look.
- Dead Link CheckerLink rot: expired domains, dead hosts and pages that quietly stopped existing.
- 404 Link Checker404, 410 and soft 404, and why a 404 list is not the whole picture.
- Broken Link MonitorThe recurring version: scan, alert on new breaks, record when they recover.
- Website Change MonitorAlso watch important pages for content changes.
TagPipes is the platform this will be part of.
Broken link monitoring is still being finished and is not in the product yet. What is in it today is tagging, measurement, consent and privacy tooling, and a free trial is the fastest way to see whether that is useful to you.
See what TagPipes does todayFree 14-day trial. No credit card.