Free Broken Link Checker

Three ways at once. Visitors who hit a 404 lose trust and bounce, which hurts engagement signals. Crawlers waste crawl budget following links that go nowhere, which means less of your real content gets crawled. And a page littered with dead links reads as stale or unmaintained — engines prefer to rank and cite pages that are actively cared for.

Internal ones. An external link can die because someone else's site changed — annoying, but not your structure failing. A broken internal link means your own site is leaking its own link equity and stranding both visitors and crawlers inside pages you control. Fix internal breaks first; they're also the easiest to fix permanently.

They're soft problems rather than hard failures. Each redirect adds a round trip of latency, can leak a small amount of ranking signal, and risks chaining into more redirects as sites restructure over time. The link works today — but pointing it directly at the final URL is faster for users, cleaner for crawlers, and removes a future failure point.

Monthly for most sites, and immediately after any restructure — yours or a key partner's. Link rot is continuous: studies consistently find a meaningful share of web links die within a few years. High-traffic pages and resource roundups with many outbound links deserve a more frequent sweep than rarely-visited archive pages.

2xx codes (like 200) mean the link is healthy. 3xx codes (301, 302, 308) mean it redirects somewhere else — working, but worth updating to the final destination. 4xx codes mean the page is gone or blocked: 404 is not found, 410 is deliberately removed, 403 is access denied. 5xx codes mean the destination server is failing. No code at all means the server didn't respond.

Fifty parallel checks keeps the run fast — usually 10–25 seconds — while covering the full link list of most pages. If your page has more, we check the first 50 and tell you how many were found in total; run key sections of very long pages separately for full coverage.