Tools for checking broken links on your website
November 10. 2020
First, if you want your website to be fully functional and serve its purpose without interruption, each element has to be working. For more than one reason, you need to pay special attention to your links. When someone tries to visit your links, they are hoping to find useful content. If the link returns the error because it’s broken, your visitors will be disappointed. And in most cases, they will leave your website. Second, user experience is not the only bad aspect of your broken links. These broken or dead links, as they are often called, are not good for SEO too. Furthermore, search engines can lower your ranking position because of the bad user experience your website provides. Fortunately, there are many useful tools for checking broken links on your website you can find online.
Some of the most popular tools for checking broken links
When you have a small website, it’s not hard to manually check if your links are valid or not. But if you have dozens of pages and sub-pages, it can be a tremendous job to do. Of course, you can get professionals to audit and maintain your entire website. Or, you can try to do it on your own, if you have the necessary means. Anyway, tools for checking your dead links come quite useful. Usually, they are automated link checkers with the ability to scan the entire website, searching for errors. But there are also complete SEO suits where link checking is one among many features. Either way, they are effective solutions to identify everything that is not how it’s supposed to be.
Here are some of the most popular tools you can use to check the state of your links, and even your competitors:
- Dead link checker
- Broken Link Checker
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Sitechecker
- W3C Link Checker
- SEMrush
- Dr. Link Check
- Broken Link Checker from Ahref
1. Dead link checker is one of the free tools for checking broken links
Overall, this type of tool identifies broken links by crawling through your website. There are two convenient features you can use, in general. First, you have a Multi-check feature which is useful for finding broken links on multiple websites. Second, there is an Auto-check feature you can set to check your website regularly and automatically send you reports. In general, this is a great simple solution for both webmasters and SEO professionals. You can check your websites without having to download or install anything.
Price: Free
2. Broken Link Checker
Another mostly free online validator you can use to check your pages for dead links. It will scan your pages and send you a complete analysis of their condition. When you need something for a quick SEO audit, this tool will also show you the exact location of your bad links in your HTML code.
Price:
- Free version with a limit of 3,000 pages without including links to documents and images.
- Full commercial version – you need to contact them to acquire it.
3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog offers a lot of useful SEO tools. Among which is their SEO Spider you can use to crawl your website. You can use it on both small and large websites, and analyze the results in real-time. Since it’s a downloadable tool, you will be able to use it from your desktop to find all the necessary information about your links.
Price: Free with a crawling limit of 500 URLs and £149.00 (about $194) per license per year
4. Sitechecker
Sitechecker crawls your website in search of any broken links and gives you a full report about your next course of action. Also, you get complete information about indexation errors, redirect chains, orphan links, and more. Quite a valuable tool when you need an instant solution for a better user experience. Just like many other web tools, you can use it on all operative systems and CMSs. Additionally, it allows you to see a visual structure of links and can be set for auto alerts.
Price: From free to $69 per month for the Growing package
*You get a 20% discount on annual billing
5. W3C Link Checker
Not so visually appealing but a very useful tool to check links and anchors of websites. It offers a detailed (somewhat lengthy) report with plenty of information about your links. Among others, you can see a list of redirects, links without the exact URL, and duplicate and empty anchors. Also, you are given the option to decide the depth of the analysis of this tool.
Price: Free
6. SEMrush – a complete set of tools for checking broken links
For those looking for a complete suite to boost their SEO, SEMrush is one of the top choices. Its link checker also examines both links and anchor texts. With a regular report, it also offers visual reports through pie-charts, graphs, and geo-distribution on a world map. Additionally, you can use it to inspect and compare your links with competitors’ links.
Price:
- 14 days free trial
- from $99.95 per month for the Pro package to $399.95 per month for the Business package
*You can also save 16% with annual billing.
7. Dr. Link Check
This is a link checking tool with a convenient dashboard where you can see all the result summary split by categories. Besides checking internal and external links, this tool also checks images, HTML code, style sheets, and other files. In addition, you have the option to schedule it to run automatically.
Price: From free for up to 1500 links to $129 per month for the Premium package.
8. Broken Link Checker from Ahref
Broken Link Checker from Ahref gives you a full report about all the backlinks to your website. Despite the fact that Ahref uses one of the largest backlink databases, it delivers results at great speeds. In addition, you can use this tool to check for your competitor’s backlinks or to find many opportunities to implement a broken-link building strategy. This is, by all means, one of the best tools for both large enterprises and smaller companies. The only downside is its price.
Price:
- The free version of Ahref’s Backlink Checker where you can check how it works.
- Up to $999 per month for the Agency package
*You additionally get 2 months for free for annual billing.
In the end, when it comes to providing a quality user experience, fixing your broken tools is a must. Not only it provides a better experience but affects your ranking position as well. That’s why it’s always useful to know which tools for checking broken links on your website will be proper. Sometimes, the price might be the limit. In other cases, industry-specific needs might dictate the choice. Nevertheless, nothing should stop you from trying, testing, comparing, and combining any tool as it suits your needs.