Robots.txt Generator
Create crawler instructions easily
Discover and repair broken links across your website or blog. Perfect for bloggers, content creators using WordPress, Shopify, Drupal, and more.
Start Your Free Link CheckInput your website URL and select the crawl depth to begin the link checking process.
Our tool crawls your website, checking each link to identify any that are broken or not functioning properly.
Get a comprehensive report of all broken links found, including their locations and status codes.
Crawls your entire site and flags every link returning 404, 500, or redirect chains — internal and external.
Checks links inside your content, navigation, footer, and sidebar — not just the main body text.
Distinguishes between 404 (page gone), 301 (redirect), 302 (temporary redirect), and 5xx (server error) so you know exactly what to fix.
Exports results as CSV so you can hand the list to a developer or work through fixes in a spreadsheet.
Re-check specific URLs after you've applied fixes to verify the problem is actually resolved.
Runs from our servers — no browser extension, no desktop app, no installation. Paste a URL and go.
Google allocates a finite crawl budget to every site. Every time Googlebot follows a link and lands on a 404, that's a request wasted on a dead end instead of indexing your actual content. On large sites with hundreds of broken links, this adds up fast — entire sections of your site can go weeks without being recrawled because the bot spent its budget chasing ghosts. Fixing broken links means more of your crawl budget goes toward pages that actually matter.
Every link on your site passes authority (link equity) to the page it points to. When that link points to a 404, that equity evaporates — it doesn't flow anywhere useful. If you have a high-authority page linking to a broken URL, you're effectively throwing away ranking power. This is especially painful when external sites link to pages you've deleted or moved without setting up redirects. That incoming authority just leaks into nothing.
Visitors who hit a 404 page are significantly more likely to bounce than those who land on working pages. A single dead link in your navigation or within a blog post can kill trust instantly. People assume if your links are broken, your information might be outdated too. Google pays attention to engagement signals — if users consistently bounce from your site, that's a signal your content isn't delivering what people expect.
Internal broken links are entirely your fault — and entirely within your control. They happen when you delete pages, change URL slugs, or restructure your site without updating all the links that pointed to the old URLs. These should be your top priority because you can fix them immediately. External broken links are different: they break over time as other websites change their structure, take pages offline, or shut down entirely. You can't control when that happens, but you can control how quickly you respond by swapping in a working alternative or removing the dead link.
Finding broken links is the easy part. Fixing them correctly is what actually moves the needle. Start by running a full site audit to see the bigger picture, then work through the fixes below in order of how often you'll use them.
If you moved a page to a new URL, a 301 redirect is the correct fix. It tells search engines the page has permanently moved, and it transfers most of the link equity from the old URL to the new one. For example, if /blog/old-post moved to /blog/updated-post, set up a 301 from the old URL to the new one. You can use our .htaccess generator to set up redirects, or use your CMS's built-in redirect tools.
Sometimes the target page still exists — it just moved to a different URL. In that case, the cleanest fix is to update the href to point to the correct URL. This avoids adding another redirect to the chain and gives users a direct path. It's more work than a redirect, but it's the better long-term solution when you have access to the source page.
If the target page is truly gone — the resource no longer exists anywhere, and there's no reasonable replacement — just remove the link. A dead link that sits there indefinitely is worse than no link at all. If the link was inside body content, rewrite the sentence so it reads naturally without the link.
Redirect chains happen when one redirect points to another, which points to another — like A redirects to B, B redirects to C, C redirects to D. Each hop loses a small amount of link equity and adds latency. Google will follow up to about 10 hops, but best practice is to consolidate the chain so A redirects directly to D. Our tool flags these chains in the scan results so you can spot them immediately.
Start with internal broken links — you control them, and they're usually the fastest to resolve. Next, tackle broken links on your highest-traffic pages, since those affect the most visitors. Also check your robots.txt to make sure you're not accidentally blocking pages that should be accessible. Finally, address external broken links that point to high-authority resources you were citing. A broken link to a random blog post matters less than a broken link to a government study you were using as a source.
It works with all WordPress permalink structures, including custom ones. It checks both the original and pretty permalink versions so nothing gets missed.
Yes, it scans Shopify stores for broken links in product variants, collections, and automatically generated pages like tag archives.
It follows Drupal's content structure, including entity references and views, and checks all linked URLs for broken responses.
Yes. It crawls the front-end of your website, so it works regardless of the back-end technology serving the content.
Select the JavaScript rendering option and the tool will execute JS on each page before extracting links. This catches links loaded dynamically in SPAs and AJAX-heavy websites.
It detects broken links that point to PDFs and other downloadable files. However, it does not scan inside those files for links — only links on web pages that reference them.
It follows redirects and reports the full chain. If a redirect leads to a broken link or a redirect loop, the results show the complete redirect path so you can pinpoint where it breaks.
By default, it cannot access login-protected areas. For enterprise users, we offer solutions to check links behind authentication.
Yes, results are split into internal and external broken links. This helps you prioritize — internal links are within your control, while external ones depend on third-party sites.
Monthly checks are enough for most sites. If you publish content frequently or link out to a lot of external resources, bump that up to weekly — external pages go offline more often than you'd expect. For sites with 100+ pages, consider setting up automated monitoring so you catch broken links within days instead of discovering them during a manual audit weeks later.
Google has said broken links are not a direct ranking factor — having a few 404s won't trigger a penalty. But that doesn't mean they're harmless. Broken links waste crawl budget that could be spent indexing your good pages. They cut off link equity flow to pages that need it. And they frustrate visitors, which leads to higher bounce rates and lower engagement — signals that can indirectly hurt your rankings over time. The sites that rank well tend to be the ones that keep their house in order.
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