Broken-link checker for one page

How to use it

1. 1Enter the address you want to checkType or paste it into the field marked "Address to check", including the https:// at the front. Use a page with a lot of outbound links — a resources page, an old article, a footer-heavy landing page.
2. 2Press Check and wait a few secondsThe request runs from our server rather than from your browser, so your cache, your extensions and your login session cannot affect the answer. That is the point of it: you are seeing what an anonymous visitor sees.
3. 3Start with the broken onesEvery link on the page is requested and its answer recorded. A 404 or a 5xx is a link a reader will hit and a crawler will waste a visit on.
4. 4Do not ignore the redirected onesA link that redirects still works, so it is easy to leave. It is also a link you can point straight at its destination, which is faster for readers and cleaner for crawlers.
5. 5Read "blocked" as unknown, not as brokenSome sites refuse automated requests. The tool reports that as its own state rather than calling the link dead, because it does not know that and neither would you from the same evidence.
6. 6Share or keep the result within 24 hoursThe result has its own link you can send to whoever needs to act on it. It is deleted 24 hours after the check ran, so save anything you need to keep — and re-run the check after a change rather than trusting an old link.

About this tool

This tool reads every link on one page and opens each one to see what answers. Broken links, redirect chains, links that refuse automated clients and links with no readable text are all reported separately, because they are different problems with different fixes.

It checks one page rather than a whole site, and it says up front how many links it found and how many it actually opened. Checking a link costs a request to someone else's server, so there is a limit — and a checker that hid that limit while announcing "no broken links" would be worse than no checker.

Understanding the result

Coverage comes first for a reason. If we checked 60 of 214 links, "no broken links" means no broken links among those 60. The unchecked ones are not known to be fine.

A 403 or 429 is not a broken link. It means the site refused us — often because it blocks automated clients, or because we had just made several requests to it. Open one in a browser before changing anything.

Redirects are not errors either. They are worth updating because every hop costs your visitors latency, and because a link pointing somewhere unexpected is how a site quietly starts sending traffic where it did not intend.

Links with no text, no image alt and no aria-label are listed separately. A screen reader reads the URL aloud, and a crawler learns nothing about the destination.

Example

https://example.com/resources

Checked 26 of 26 destinations · 41.9s
0 broken · 2 no answer · 1 refused us (403) · 2 redirect
22 internal, 4 external, 0 nofollow

Limitations

• One page at a time. Whole-site crawling is a later phase.
• There is a link ceiling and a time budget, both reported. A page with many links or slow hosts will be checked only in part.
• Links added by JavaScript are not seen — but a crawler reading raw HTML does not see them either, which is itself worth knowing.
• We check from our servers. A link that geo-blocks or rate-limits our address may answer differently for you.
• mailto:, tel: and javascript: links are counted and never requested. A mailto is not a broken link.

Questions