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Broken Link Checker

Dead links, redirects and missing images on a page. Free, and checked from our server, so you see what the public internet sees — no sign-up or install.

About Broken Link Checker

Give it one page and it reads every address on it — anchors, images, stylesheets, scripts and iframes — then asks each one whether it still answers. What comes back is a table of outcomes: what worked, what returned 404, what timed out, and what quietly redirects somewhere else.

Redirects are reported separately from failures because they are a different problem. A link that redirects still works for a visitor; it just costs a round trip, and on an internal link it usually means the page moved and nothing was updated. The final address is shown so the fix is a copy and paste.

The checks run from the server, six at a time, so a page's worth of links takes seconds rather than a minute. Every address is requested with HEAD first and retried with GET only when a server refuses HEAD, which is common enough to be worth handling and rude enough not to do by default.

This is one page, not a crawl. Nothing behind the links is followed, and private or unroutable addresses are refused rather than requested — a link to localhost or an internal IP is reported as skipped, not as working.

This one is scored on the share of addresses that answered rather than on a count of faults: one dead link among sixty is a different page from one among three, and the grade reflects that.

Where it helps

  • Checks links, images, stylesheets, scripts and iframes, so a missing asset is caught alongside a dead link.
  • Separates redirects from failures and names the final address, which is the line you actually have to change.
  • Says why a request failed in words — host not found, connection refused, timed out, certificate expired — rather than showing an error code.
  • Runs from the server, so it is not stopped by the cross-origin rules that prevent a browser from checking other sites.
  • Refuses private and unroutable addresses rather than fetching them, and applies the same rule to every hop of a redirect.

Limits

  • One page at a time: it does not crawl a site, and it will not find a broken link on a page you did not name.
  • A server that blocks unknown clients can answer 403 to the checker and 200 to a browser, so a handful of false failures is normal.
  • Fragments are not verified — a link to #section is checked as the page it points at, not as the anchor inside it.
  • Pages that build their links in JavaScript expose few of them to a checker that reads the HTML as served.
  • Rate limits apply, and very large pages are read only to the first 2 MB.

Frequently asked questions

Why does a link work in my browser but fail here?

Usually bot protection. Some servers answer an unfamiliar user agent with 403 or a challenge page, and a few refuse HEAD requests entirely. Open any surprising failure by hand before changing the link.

Is a redirect something I need to fix?

Not urgently, but an internal one is worth fixing: it means the page moved. Point the link at the final address and the hop, and the risk of the chain breaking later, both go away.

Why was a link skipped?

It pointed at a private or unresolvable address — localhost, an internal IP, or a name that does not resolve publicly. Those are never requested, because a checker that fetches internal addresses on request is a security hole.

Can it check a whole site?

No. It checks the page you give it. For a site, feed it the pages your sitemap lists, one at a time, starting with the ones that get traffic.

Does it follow nofollow links?

Yes. rel="nofollow" is an instruction to search engines about ranking, not a statement about whether the address works, so it is checked like any other.

Related tools

  • HTTP Headers — Grade a site's security headers from A+ to F, see every response header, and get the fix for your server
  • Sitemap Generator — An XML sitemap from a list of addresses
  • Meta Tag Generator — The head tags a page needs, with a search-result preview
  • SSL Checker — Grade a TLS endpoint and inspect the certificate it serves
  • SERP Preview — Your page as a search result, measured in pixels
  • Open Graph Generator — Social card tags for Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack and X

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