Free Broken Link Checker

What this checker does

Paste a URL and we fetch that page once, collect every <a href> on it, then request each destination — up to 100 links, and up to 10 per destination site — and record what it answers. You get the status code, a plain-English reason, the anchor text the link sits behind, and whether it points inside your site or out to someone else’s.

Your own site counts as a destination site. A page with a navigation and a footer usually links to itself more than ten times, so we check the first ten of those in the order they appear in the HTML and list the rest as skipped past the cap. The result says how many links the page had and how many we checked, so you can always see the difference.

Two details make the result more trustworthy than a raw status dump. First, we follow redirects: a link that 301s onto a missing page is reported broken at its real destination, not waved through because the first hop returned 301. Second, we separate “broken” from “could not check” — see below.

What counts as broken — and what doesn’t

• Broken — 404, 410, any other 4xx, or a 5xx server error. The destination answered, and it answered with a failure.
• Could not check — 401, 403, 429, 451 or no answer at all. The destination refused us, which is not the same as being dead.
• Skipped — not fetched: #anchors, mailto:, tel:, javascript:, files (images, PDFs, CSS, JS, archives, Office docs), Cloudflare /cdn-cgi/ paths, duplicates, and any link past the caps below — on a page with a long navigation, the cap is usually the largest group.

That middle bucket is the honest part. Plenty of sites sit behind Cloudflare, Akamai or a WAF that answers automated requests with 403 Forbidden while serving the page normally to a person in a browser. Tools that count those as dead send you off deleting links that work. We list them separately and say so — open a “could not check” link yourself before you touch it.

What it cannot do

• One page at a time. It reads the links on the URL you enter and stops there — it does not crawl your site. The free SEO audit crawls up to 500 pages if you need the site-wide picture.
• Up to 100 links per page, and at most 10 per destination site — including your own site, so a page with more than ten internal links has the first ten checked and the rest skipped — inside a 20-second budget. When a cap bites, the result says how many links the page had and how many we checked, so you never get a quietly short list.
• Links in the HTML only. Links injected later by JavaScript aren’t in the page we fetch, so they aren’t checked.
• A snapshot, not monitoring. A 5xx can be a five-minute outage. Re-run the check before deleting a link over one.

How to read the results

Start with the Broken table and work down it: a 404 or 410 on an internal link is yours to fix immediately — correct the URL, or redirect the old one to its replacement. A 404 on an external link means someone else moved or deleted the page; update it to the new location, point it at an archived copy, or drop the link and keep the sentence. Leave 5xx rows until you have re-checked them once.

Then skim Could not check and open anything that matters in a browser tab. Finally, read the skipped count next to the note above the tables: a page with 40 links found but only a handful checked usually means the 10-per-site cap bit, because most of those 40 point back at your own site — files, mailto: links and repeats are the smaller part. Nothing in the skipped group was found broken; it was never fetched. For the links a single page cannot cover, the free SEO audit crawls up to 500 pages and reports the broken links it finds across them. The anchor text column exists so you can search your own content for the link instead of hunting through the HTML.