How to Check a Website for Broken Links (Free, No Signup)
· 3 min read
Broken links are one of the few SEO problems that are both easy to find and easy to fix. Visitors who hit a 404 leave, search engines waste crawl budget on dead URLs, and every broken internal link stops passing authority to the page it was meant to support.
Here is the process we recommend, whether you look after one site or fifty.
1. Run a quick scan
Start with a crawl that follows the links on your pages and checks every one of them, internal and external. Our free broken link checker crawls up to 25 pages of a site, checks every link and image it finds, and lists each failure with the page it was found on. No signup is needed.
For a first pass, scan your homepage. Most sites link their key pages from the homepage, navigation and footer, so the first 25 pages usually cover the links that matter most.
2. Read the status codes
Every broken link comes back with a reason:
- 404 Not Found: the page was removed or the URL was mistyped. This is the most common cause.
- 410 Gone: the page was removed on purpose. It is fine for a dead page to return 410, but your own pages shouldn't link to it.
- 5xx server errors: the target server failed. Re-check later before you change anything, because these are often temporary.
- Unreachable: DNS failed, the connection timed out, or the domain expired. On external links, this usually means the site is gone for good.
3. Fix in the right order
Not every broken link costs the same. Work through them in this order:
- Broken links in navigation, header or footer. They appear on every page, so one fix removes hundreds of broken links.
- Broken internal links in body content. Point them at the new URL, or add a 301 redirect from the old URL. See our guide to setting up 301 redirects.
- Broken images. Missing product or hero images make a page look abandoned.
- Broken outbound links. Replace them with a current source, link to an archived copy, or remove the link.
If many old URLs break at once, fix it at the source with redirects rather than editing every page by hand. This is common after a migration or a change of permalink structure.
4. Watch for redirect chains
A link that goes through three redirects before it reaches a page still "works", but it's slow and leaks authority. When you update links, point them straight at the final URL. Our guide on redirect chains explains how to spot them.
5. Stop new broken links from appearing
Links break all the time: other sites delete pages, a CMS update changes a slug, or someone renames a product. A one-off scan is a snapshot. To stay on top of it you need a scheduled crawl that alerts you only when something new breaks.
That's what DeadLinkPatrol does. It crawls your sites on a schedule, checks every link and emails you, or sends a webhook, the moment a new one breaks, with the exact page to fix. Agencies use the white-label reports to show clients the maintenance work each month.
Quick checklist
- Scan the homepage and your top landing pages.
- Fix site-wide navigation and footer links first.
- Redirect removed URLs that still have backlinks or traffic.
- Update links to point at final URLs, not redirects.
- Schedule a recurring scan so new breakage gets caught in days, not months.
Ready? Check your site for broken links now. It takes about 30 seconds.