Broken links sit on websites quietly, doing damage. A page that linked to a competitor’s resource five years ago now links to a 404. A URL you renamed last month has 12 internal links still pointing at the old slug. Every one of these costs you crawl budget, link equity and trust — and almost no one checks.

This guide covers exactly how to find broken links on any web page in under a minute, for free, without signing up to anything. It also covers what the paid tools actually do that the free ones don’t, so you can make an informed call before reaching for a credit card.

What counts as a broken link

A broken link is any clickable link that does not lead to a working page. The most common types:

404 Not Found — the URL no longer exists. Someone deleted the page, renamed it, or moved the site.
500 / 502 / 503 — the destination server is broken or temporarily down.
Network error — DNS lookup failed, the domain expired, the cert is invalid.
Empty redirect chains — the link redirects, but the final hop is broken.
Jump links to missing anchors — a link like #section-3 that points to an id that no longer exists on the page.

Search engines treat all of these as link rot. A page with several broken outbound links signals “neglected” — which Google has said publicly is a quality signal it considers.

Why broken links matter

Three reasons, in order of impact:

1. Crawl budget. Google’s crawler has a finite budget per site. Every request to a broken URL is a request that could have been used to crawl a working page. On a 10,000-page site this is enormous. On a 30-page site it barely matters.

2. User experience and trust. A visitor who clicks a broken link is gone. They do not file a bug report. They click back, judge your site as careless, and that judgement carries forward. For a consultancy site or any high-trust niche, this compounds.

3. Link equity. Internal links pass authority around your site. An internal link to a 404 is authority you spent on a destination that does not exist. Multiply that by every broken internal link and you are bleeding signal that should be helping pages rank.

How broken links happen (it’s almost never carelessness)

Most broken links are not the result of someone mistyping a URL. The usual culprits:

You renamed a page. WordPress changed the slug when you updated the title. Now every internal link to the old slug is broken.
A site you linked to went down. Old blog posts often reference industry blogs that no longer exist.
A competitor restructured. They moved /services/seo/ to /what-we-do/seo/ and forgot the redirect. Every link you pointed at the old URL now 404s.
CMS migration. You moved from Squarespace to WordPress, internal IDs changed, some links broke.
HTTPS migration that did not redirect properly. Internal http:// links to your own pages now show as mixed content or fail.

None of these are anyone’s fault. They are just what happens to websites over time. The right response is regular auditing, not blame.

Four ways to find broken links — compared

There is no single “best” way. Each method trades off against another. Here is what actually works:

Method 1: Manually click every link (don’t)

This is the obvious approach and the worst one. A typical blog post has 80 to 120 links. Clicking each one, waiting for it to load, judging the response, and noting down the broken ones — for one page — takes maybe 40 minutes. You will miss several. You will not be able to do this for more than a couple of pages without losing the will to live. Skip this.

Method 2: Browser extensions

Extensions like Check My Links (Chrome Web Store) crawl every link on the page currently open in your browser and highlight broken ones inline. The good: you stay in the browser, see results visually overlaid on the page, no signup. The bad: limited to one tab at a time, no export, no audit-grade reporting, often blocked by sites that detect bot-like behaviour from a real browser.

Worth it for: a quick spot-check while editing a draft post in WordPress.

Method 3: Desktop crawlers (Screaming Frog)

Screaming Frog is the industry standard for site-wide crawls. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs, which is enough for many small sites. The paid licence (~£199/year) unlocks unlimited URLs plus a load of advanced features.

Pros: full-site, deep, audit-grade, scriptable, runs locally so no rate-limit worries. Cons: heavy install, steep learning curve if you have not used it before, and 500 URLs caps out fast on a real site.

Worth it for: full-site audits when you have time to learn the tool.

Method 4: Free hosted tools

A hosted tool you can use from any browser, on any page, with no install. This is what most people actually need most of the time. Our Broken Link Checker is one of these. It audits a single page in 25 to 90 seconds and gives you a dashboard plus a sortable table of every link with status, type, anchor text and security flags.

Pros: zero install, results in under a minute, no signup, generous free limits. Cons: single-page (not full-site) auditing, depends on the host site being reachable from the tool’s server.

Worth it for: spot-checking a new blog post before publishing, auditing a competitor’s resource page, checking the homepage’s links every quarter.

Walkthrough: using a free Broken Link Checker

Three steps from URL to full audit:

1. Paste the URL. Drop the page you want to audit into the input field. Pick advanced options if you need them (mobile user-agent, treating subdomains as internal). Hit “Run Link Audit.”

2. Read the dashboard. Six summary cards appear at the top: total links, broken, redirects, internal, external, nofollow. Then a status-breakdown bar showing healthy vs. redirect vs. broken vs. ambiguous. A typical blog post might show 110 healthy / 3 redirects / 2 broken / 1 ambiguous.

3. Read the insights. Below the dashboard is a panel of plain-English findings. Things like “3 broken links need fixing — 1 external, 2 internal” or “4 external links open in a new tab without rel=noopener — minor security risk.” Each insight has a “Show me” button that filters the table to the relevant rows.

The table below the insights shows every link with status code, anchor text, internal/external type, rel attributes and response time. You can sort by any column and filter to broken / redirects / nofollow / mixed-content / and so on. Export to CSV when you want to share results.

What to do once you’ve found the broken links

Triage by type. Different broken links need different fixes:

Broken internal links (a link to your own site that 404s)

This is the most common and the easiest to fix. The link is pointing at a URL that no longer exists, usually because:

The destination page got renamed. Fix: update the link to the new URL.
The destination page got deleted. Fix: either restore the destination, delete the link, or replace it with a link to a similar living page.
The destination has an old slug from before a CMS migration. Fix: add a 301 redirect from the old slug to the new one — this also catches any external sites that linked to the old URL.

Use a search-and-replace tool (Better Search Replace plugin for WordPress, or a SQL find-and-replace) to fix the same broken link across multiple pages in one go.

Broken external links (a link to another site that 404s)

You have three options:

Find a replacement. Search for the original resource — it may have moved. The Wayback Machine often has a copy you can check what the page used to say, then find the equivalent on a still-live site.
Delete the link. Sometimes the easiest fix. If the broken link was decorative or non-load-bearing, just remove the link tag and keep the anchor text as plain text.
Redirect to an alternative. If you control the destination through a service that lets you redirect, point it at a working alternative.

A note: do not “fix” external broken links by mass-deleting them. Some are flagged by automated tools as broken when they actually work fine in a browser. Mega-sites like Twitter / X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Medium often return 403 or 503 to bots while serving fine to humans. Our tool flags these specifically as ambiguous so you know to check manually.

Broken jump links (#section that does not exist)

These are anchor links inside a single page (#summary, #step-3, etc.) that point to an id no longer on the page. Usually caused by editing the page and removing or renaming the headings the jump-links targeted.

Fix: either restore the destination id, or update the jump link to point at the new heading. Use the browser’s inspector to find each heading’s current id.

Redirects (3xx)

Not technically broken but worth cleaning up. A redirect adds a roundtrip, wastes a tiny bit of crawl budget, and is one more dependency on the redirect rule continuing to exist. Fix: update each link to point at the final URL directly. Same destination, no redirect.

How often to audit

Realistic schedules:

Every new blog post or landing page before publishing — catches broken outbound links you cited from old sources. Two minutes of audit, hours of credibility saved.
Every quarter for high-traffic pages — homepage, top-5 traffic pages, primary service pages.
After any site migration, CMS change, or URL restructure — non-optional. Migrations break things; audit immediately and re-audit a week later.
Annually for the rest — every other page on the site at least once a year.

If you have a small site (under 50 pages) you can audit the lot in an afternoon. If you have a big site, Screaming Frog or Google Search Console’s Coverage report is the right tool for that scale.

Don’t forget Search Console

For your own site, Google Search Console is the authoritative source. The Pages report (formerly Coverage) shows every URL Google has tried to crawl on your site, including any that returned 404, 500, redirect issues, blocked-by-robots and so on. It is free, comprehensive, and updated continuously.

Use Search Console for site-wide audits of your own site. Use a hosted Broken Link Checker for single-page audits of any page (yours or anyone’s). Use Screaming Frog when you want a deeper site-wide crawl with custom rules.

These tools are complementary, not competing.

FAQ

Do broken links actually hurt my Google rankings? Indirectly, yes. Google has confirmed that link rot is one quality signal it considers among hundreds. A handful of broken links on a site is normal. A page with 20% of its links broken signals neglected content, and that signal compounds with other quality signals to affect rankings.

Why does the tool say a link is broken when it works in my browser? Some sites block automated checks. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter / X and Cloudflare-protected pages often return 403 or 503 to anything that looks like a bot. The Broken Link Checker flags these as ambiguous rather than broken — verify manually before fixing.

How long does an audit take? Roughly 25 to 90 seconds depending on link count and how fast each destination responds. A typical blog post (80 to 120 links) finishes in under 30 seconds. A heavy resource page with 200+ outbound links can take 90 seconds because the audit checks 8 links in parallel and respects per-link timeouts.

Can I audit my whole site at once? Not in our tool — it is single-page only. For full-site audits use Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) or Search Console (free, unlimited, your own site only).

Try it now

Pick a recent blog post or your homepage, drop the URL into our free Broken Link Checker, and run a real audit. Most pages return a few surprises — a broken external link to a defunct industry resource, a redirect chain that wastes a hop, a generic-anchor warning that is genuinely worth fixing.

If you find more than you expected and want a proper site-wide audit, book a free consultation — we run audits like this for clients across London and the wider UK and can talk through what would actually move the needle for your site.

How to Find Broken Links on Your Website (Free, No Signup)