Website Broken Link Checker
Checking one page is easy. Checking a site means deciding how deep to go, what counts as part of the site, and what to do with two thousand findings on Monday morning.
Whole-site checking is not open here yet
TagPipes is finishing continuous link monitoring first. Rather than show a scan box that cannot scan, this page is the useful part: how site-wide checking works and what to do with the output. There is a form below if you want telling when it opens.
The free check that is open today is the Website Accessibility Checker: paste a URL, get a report in a few minutes, no signup.
Where a website's broken links come from
Almost none of them are typos. On a site of any age, broken links arrive in clusters, and each cluster has a cause worth knowing because fixing the cause fixes dozens of findings at once.
A CMS migration is the largest single source: URL structures change, redirects are written for the pages somebody remembered, and everything else silently becomes a 404. Deleting or unpublishing content is the second: the page goes, the twelve links pointing at it do not. Then there is the slow one, outbound link rot, where other people's sites move, restructure or end, and nothing on your side changes at all.
The pattern matters for triage. A migration produces a burst of internal 404s that a handful of redirect rules will clear. Link rot produces a trickle of outbound failures that no rule can prevent and that only a schedule will catch.
Four decisions that change the answer
Two tools disagreeing about a site almost always disagree on one of these.
| Decision | The narrow choice | The broad choice | Which to start with |
|---|---|---|---|
| How deep to crawl | The pages in your navigation and sitemap | Everything reachable, including archives, tags and pagination | Narrow. The deep tail of a blog is where findings go to be ignored |
| Whether to check outbound links | Internal only: links to your own pages | Every link, including to other people's sites | Internal first. They are your fault, your fix, and the highest value per hour |
| How to treat redirects | Follow them; a link that arrives is not broken | Flag every redirect as something to tidy | Follow them. Redirect tidying is housekeeping, not repair |
| Whether to render pages | Read the HTML the server returns | Run the page in a browser and read what exists afterwards | Depends on the site. If your navigation is built in JavaScript, reading the HTML sees almost nothing |
Start narrow. A first scan that returns forty findings gets fixed. A first scan that returns four thousand gets a meeting, and then gets forgotten.
Working through a site-wide result
The order that gets a real site fixed rather than surveyed.
1. Group by destination, not by source page
One deleted page produces one finding per page that links to it. Grouping by the broken destination turns a list of two hundred rows into a list of eleven actual problems, which is the number worth looking at.
2. Fix at the destination where you can
If forty pages link to a URL you deleted, a single redirect fixes all forty, including the copies of that link in emails and PDFs you cannot edit. Editing forty pages fixes only the forty pages.
3. Then fix at the source, for the rest
Links to somebody else's dead page have no redirect available. Update or remove them, page by page, worst page first.
4. Re-check, and keep re-checking
Verify the fixes landed, then put the check on a schedule. A site that was clean in March is not clean in June, and nothing about that is a failure of the March fix.
How often to look
Different parts of a site rot at different speeds, which is the real argument for a schedule rather than a habit.
After every release
A deploy that renames URLs is the single most reliable way to create internal 404s. Checking after a release catches them while the change is still fresh in somebody's head.
Monthly for outbound links
Other people's sites break on their own schedule. A monthly pass over external links keeps the rot from accumulating into a project.
Continuously for pages that matter
Pricing, checkout, the main navigation, the top ten landing pages. A handful of pages where a dead link costs money on the day, rather than at the next audit.
After a content migration
Not once. Immediately, a week later, and a month later. Migrations surface problems in waves as caches expire and search engines recrawl.
Before a campaign goes out
The landing page and everything it links to. This is the cheapest check on the list and the one most often skipped.
Never, by hand, forever
The honest failure mode. Manual checking works for about two months, then somebody gets busy. It is the reason monitoring exists as a category.
Frequently asked questions
Tell me when site-wide checking opens
One email when the 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.
- Broken Link CheckerWhat a link check does, what it reports, and what to fix first.
- 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.
TagPipes is the platform this will be part of.
Site-wide 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.
See what TagPipes does todayFree 14-day trial. No credit card.