Best Free Tools to Check For Broken Links on a Website.

If you have a website with many external and internal links you know that over time some of these links become broken.

Websites close down, navigation changes, and URLs get renamed without proper redirects. There are many reasons why links no longer point to the right place.

Despite all our best efforts, managing broken links is an unfortunate part of managing the website.

It’s always a good idea to regularly check for broken links on your website to ensure a good user experience and to prevent any issues with search engine crawlers.

But If you’re wondering how to check websites for broken links, this guide will include the most popular tools to accomplish this.

Why It’s Important to Find and Fix Broken Links on a Regular Basis

There are many good reasons to check for broken links on your website.

If you have broken links, it will not only result in a bad user experience, but Google will also penalize your website for this.

As a result, your search engine rankings will suffer, as well.

Imagine being a user coming to a new website and finding many broken links or links pointing to 404 error pages. It’s highly unlikely you will come back to the same website again. This not just erodes the user’s trust but also negatively impacts your rankings due to an increase in the bounce rate.

Here’s why it’s important to check for broken links on your website, how often you should do this work (and what tools are available), plus some tips for how to fix them once they’ve been found.

Increase search engine rankings.

Fixing broken links on a regular basis can help you improve your site’s rankings. This is because broken links may be a sign of a larger problem with your website.

Search engines like Google see this as a sign that something isn’t right on your site, which may lead them to penalize it and decrease your rankings resulting in a drop in traffic.

On the other hand, if you regularly fix broken links and other issues with your website, search engines will see that as confirmation that everything on your site is working properly—and they’ll therefore keep indexing it!

Provide a Great User Experience

Broken links are frustrating and confusing for users. If they’re not able to find what they’re looking for, or if they get stuck in a loop, this can cause them to leave your site entirely. Broken links can also negatively impact your site’s credibility as well as its performance—they can make pages load slower and cause you to lose money if someone clicks on an offer that doesn’t work properly because of a broken link.

Improve Website Conversions

A broken link might cause customers to get frustrated if they end up on a page that’s no longer there, and as a result, they’ll will leave without buying anything!

This is why it’s critical to check your website for broken links and make sure you remove or update the ones that no longer point to the right place.

So how do you find and fix broken links on any website? There is a number of helpful free tools available.
On this list, you’ll find a list that included free broken link checker online tools, WP plugins, and Browser extensions.

Best Free Tools to Check For Broken Links On A Website

Dead Link Checker | Link: deadlinkchecker.com

Dead Link Checker crawls through your website, identifying broken links for you to correct. This handy tool allows you to search an entire website rather than go page by page.

Online Broken Link Checker | Link: brokenlinkcheck.com

This is another helpful tool for finding broken links on the entire website. This free online Checker / Validator not just tells you which of your hyperlinks are dead but will also where they are in your HTML code!

Broken Link Checker from AtomSEO | Link: atomseo.com

Broken Link Checker scans your page and provides a broken links report within a few minutes. The extension highlights which links are live and which ones are broken.

Dr.Link Check | Link: drlinkcheck.com

Broken links are bad for business. That’s why you need to find them and fix them. Dr. Link Free Checker tool tracks all the broken links on your website and shows exactly where they are.

Chrome Broken Link Checker Extension

Check My Links (Chrome Extension Link)

Check My Links is a link checker that crawls through your webpage and looks for broken links.

Broken Link Checker Extension from AtomSEO ( Chrome Extension Link )

In addition to having a free online tool, AtomSEO also offers a free browser extension.

WordPress Broken Links Plugins

WordPress Broken Link Checker ( WP Plugin Page Link )

This is a must-have WordPress plugin that will monitor your website looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. It will create or email you the list so you can take care of the links that are no longer working as soon as they’re found.

Use any of these free tools to find, monitor, and fix all the broken links on your website to make sure you provide the best user experience and continue to improve your search engine rankings.

Conclusion

If you’re not sure whether the links on your site are working properly, there are a few ways to find out. You can use a number of free online link checker tools we included. Fixing broken links is simple—all it takes is some time and effort so that users don’t experience any problems when they visit your website or app!