Broken Link Checker

Enter any page URL and get a live report of every link on it: which ones work, which redirect, and which are dead. Broken links quietly hurt user trust and crawlability, and most site owners never notice them until a visitor does. Free, no signup.

Scans one page and checks up to 100 unique links found in its HTML.

Links checked

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Warnings

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Broken

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Link-by-link results

Link	Type	Status	Result

This tool needs JavaScript to run. To check for broken links manually: open your page, click every link (or use your browser developer tools to list them), and watch for 404 "not found" pages, domains that no longer load, and links that bounce through several redirects before landing. Prioritize fixing links in your main content and navigation, since those are the ones visitors and search engine crawlers hit most.

Why broken links matter

Every link on your page is a small promise to the visitor. A link that lands on a 404 page, a dead domain, or an endless redirect chain breaks that promise, and visitors trust a site less after hitting even one dead end. For a business site, that lost trust translates directly into lost inquiries.

Search engines care too. Crawlers follow your links; when many of them dead-end, it signals a poorly maintained site and wastes crawl budget. Outbound links to pages that no longer exist also stop passing any relevance signals. None of this tanks a site overnight. Broken links are a slow leak, which is exactly why they go unnoticed for years.

How this checker works

The scan runs in two steps. First, our server fetches your page (using the same request profile a real Chrome browser sends, so bot-sensitive sites respond normally) and extracts every unique http(s) link from the HTML. Then each link is requested with a real GET (not HEAD, which many servers answer incorrectly), following up to 5 redirects, retrying once on server hiccups, and reading only enough of the response to know the status. Results stream into the table as they land.

Result	What it means
OK	The link returned a 2xx status, possibly after redirects (the redirect count is noted, and long chains are worth shortening).
Blocked	The server answered 401, 403, or 429, often bot protection like Cloudflare, not a dead page. Verify these manually in a browser before removing them.
Redirect issue	More than 5 redirects, or a redirect loop. Browsers give up on these too.
Broken	404 or 410. The page is gone. Fix or remove the link.
Server error	The server answered 5xx even after a retry. The site may be down or misconfigured.
Unreachable	DNS no longer resolves, the connection was refused, or it timed out. Typical of expired domains.
SSL problem	The certificate is invalid or expired, so browsers show a security warning instead of the page.

How to fix broken links

Broken internal links: fix the typo in the URL, restore the deleted page, or set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to its replacement.
Broken external links: find the content's new home (search the linked site, or try the Wayback Machine to see what used to be there), relink to a live alternative, or remove the link.
Long redirect chains: update the link to point directly at the final destination. Every hop adds latency and dilutes the signal.
Blocked results: open them in a normal browser. If the page loads, the site is just aggressive about bots and the link is fine as-is.

Re-run the scan after fixing to confirm. Checking your key pages (home, services, resource lists) every month or two keeps the slow leak sealed. A few percent of external links die every year, so a clean report today won't stay clean forever.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do broken links hurt SEO?

Not as a direct penalty, but as a quality and crawlability problem. Crawlers waste budget on dead ends, internal 404s break the flow of link equity through your site, and a page full of dead outbound links reads as unmaintained to both users and search engines. Fixing them is one of the cheapest maintenance wins in SEO.

Why does this tool check whole pages instead of whole sites?

A single-page scan finishes in seconds and covers the pages that matter most: your homepage, service pages, and resource lists. Site-wide crawls take minutes to hours and are agency-tool territory. Scan your handful of key pages individually and you get most of the benefit with none of the wait.

Why is a link marked Blocked when it works in my browser?

The site's bot protection (Cloudflare and similar) is refusing automated requests while allowing real browsers. That is why Blocked is a separate yellow category and not counted as broken. Verify those links manually before changing anything.

Does the checker use GET or HEAD requests?

GET, the same method browsers use. HEAD is lighter, but a meaningful share of servers answer it incorrectly: they return 200 for pages that 404 on a real visit, or reject HEAD outright. The checker stops reading the response as soon as the status is known, so the accuracy of GET comes without downloading whole pages.

Can it check links that only appear after JavaScript runs?

Not yet. It reads the HTML the server sends. For most business sites that covers every link. If your site is a single-page app that renders links client-side, the scan may find few or no links; check your rendered HTML with your browser's developer tools instead.

Is the URL I submit stored?

We fetch, scan, and discard the page you submit without keeping a scan history. Link statuses are cached briefly (a few hours) so repeated scans of popular targets stay fast.

More free tools live on the SEO tools hub. And if you want dead-link monitoring instead of manual re-checks, add your business to OnToplist. We check every listed site's link health automatically as part of keeping the directory clean.