Free Broken Link Checker

What is a broken link?

A broken link is a link that leads nowhere. Someone clicks it and gets an error page instead of what the link promised. The usual message is “404 Not Found”, which means the page is not at that address any more. It happens when a page is deleted or renamed, when a website moves to a new address, when an address is mistyped, or when another website you linked to closes down or reorganizes its pages.

Why broken links matter

• Visitors give up. A link to your prices, menu, booking page or contact form that ends in an error is a customer who may not try again.
• It looks neglected. One dead link makes people wonder what else on the site is out of date.
• Search engines notice. They follow links to find your pages. Links that go nowhere waste that and can leave pages you care about harder to find.

How to read your results

• Confirmed broken: the address answered 404 (not found) or 410 (gone). These are real and worth fixing first.
• Possible problem: we could not confirm the link works. The other site may have turned our checker away (403), asked us to slow down (429), had a server error (5xx), not answered within 8 seconds, or asked automated checkers not to visit in its robots.txt file. Many of these open fine in a normal browser, so check them yourself before you change anything.
• Working: the link answered normally, after any redirects.

Each result shows the link, what it answered, the page on your site where we found it, and the link's text, so you know exactly what to edit. The CSV download has the same list for a spreadsheet.

How to fix broken links on WordPress

1. Open the page. Use the “Found on” page from your report. Signed in to WordPress, open that page on your site and click Edit Page (or Edit Post) in the bar at the top.
2. Find the link. Look for the link text from your report. Click it: a small box shows where it points.
3. Change or remove it. Click the pencil (edit) button and paste the right address, or choose Remove link if there is no good replacement. Then click Update (or Save).
4. Links in menus and footers live outside the page. In classic themes go to Appearance → Menus (or Appearance → Widgets for footers); in block themes go to Appearance → Editor and open Navigation or the footer.
5. Moved a page? Add a redirect from the old address to the new one, so old links, bookmarks and search results still land somewhere. A redirect plugin does this without code.
6. Check again to confirm the list is clear.

How to fix broken links on Wix

1. Open the page in the Wix Editor. In your Wix dashboard click Edit Site, then open the “Found on” page from the Pages panel.
2. Select the linked item. Click the text, button or image that carries the link. For text, highlight the linked words.
3. Change the link. Click the link (chain) icon and choose where it should go: a page on your site, a web address, an email or a file. Or remove the link.
4. Menu items are changed in the menu settings: select your site menu, choose Manage Menu, then change the link of the item.
5. Moved or deleted a page? In your dashboard's SEO settings, open the URL Redirect Manager and send the old address to the new page.
6. Publish. Changes on Wix go live only after you click Publish. Then check again.

What this checker does, and its limits

• Reads up to 100 pages of your site, starting from the address you enter and following its links (and your sitemap if the links run out).
• Checks up to 1,000 different links found on those pages, each one once even if it appears on every page, and at most 50 different links to any one other website. It asks for the page header first, and makes a normal request only when a site refuses that kind of request.
• Reads only public pages. It does not sign in, fill in forms or run your site's scripts, so links that only appear after a script runs are not found. It checks links (<a href>), not images, scripts or stylesheets.
• Follows robots.txt and introduces itself as FlatRateChatBot. Links to websites that ask checkers not to visit are listed as “not checked”.
• Some sites block automated checks or limit how fast they can be asked, so a few results may be false alarms. Those are listed as possible problems, never as broken.
• Up to 10 checks a day from one connection, and 5 checks a day of the same website.
• Your report is private: only the browser tab that started the check can open it, it is not listed in search engines, and it is deleted after 7 days.

Questions