Broken link checker can help you find problematic links on your website. Sometimes, users access a website link that doesn't work so they have trouble finding the information they need.
As a website owner, you have certainly spent a lot of time managing your website content. But if your website has broken links, then your website will get poor performance. Therefore, you can use a broken link checker to find out which links are having problems so you can fix them immediately.
What is a broken link?
Broken link is a URL link that is on a website but is no longer functioning because the link has a problem. Some of the possible problems such as:
- The webpage link has been moved
- The web owner uses invalid or incorrect URLs when writing links on the website.
- Web page links have been removed from the website.
- Providing a bad experience for users.
- Affects web ranking on search engine pages
Therefore, you need to do regular maintenance to detect which links are problematic. To detect these links, you can use the following broken link checker.
6 Recommended Broken Link Checker
1. Sitechecker
Sitechecker can help you find broken links and review all external and internal links. Sitechecker has several features, such as:
- Can scan 100 pages of website for free.
- Provides a comprehensive report on the performance of your website: broken links, redirect chains, orphan links, indexation errors.
- Shows content errors: problems with meta tags and thin pages.
- Provides services for backlink tracker as well as tools for checking keyword rankings
2. SEMrush
SEMrush is a tool that can help you analyze and understand your website. This tool also provides several tools for SEO optimization, advertising, content marketing, and much more.
When you use this tool, you will get a complete audit report that includes a list of problems and errors on your website. From the report you can find out pages with broken URLs.
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that is easy to use to get information about your website. The free version of this tool allows users to collect information from 500 URLs, while for the paid version users can crawl an unlimited number of URLs.
To identify broken links, you can simply enter your website address and press the "Start" button. In a short time, you will display a list of URLs found. To find the link that has a problem, you can open the tab "Response Codes", then select "Client Error (4xx)".
4. Ahrefs
For digital marketing, Ahrefs is a favorite tool for monitoring competitors. Ahrefs also has a broken link checker feature to identify broken links on your site.
The first step to checking links is to conduct a site audit at Ahrefs. After that, you can see the report provided to find all broken links.
Ahrefs saves the report on the "internal pages" tab in the "outgoing links" menu. In the menu click "Page has links to broken pages" to see a list of problematic links.
Dead Link Checker is a broken link checker that can crawl your website systematically and detect all dead links that interfere with your website. This tool can inform you about broken links such as Page not found, Timeout, Server errors, and other errors that can cause web pages to not display.
Dead Link Checker provides three methods for checking broken links on your website, namely:
- Site Check: used to identify web pages easily and for free. You simply enter the website URL in the column provided and start the scanning process.
- Multi Check: allows users to run the scanning process for several websites at once. Reports obtained will be sent via e-mail automatically.
- Auto Check: this method can run broken link checks on your website regularly and send reports via email automatically.
Google Webmaster is a tool provided by Google to maintain the performance of your website on search engine pages. Here are a few steps to see broken links using Google webmaster tools:
- Log in to Google Webmaster Tools and access your website.
- Click Web Crawl on the diagnostics tab.
- Click Not Found to see the URL that generated 404 errors.
- Click Linked From to see a list of links that point to page 404.
- Click Download to download the report file, which you can open in Excel
