How to Find Broken Links on Your Website for Free
Scan your pages for dead links with a free checker, understand the results and fix the important ones first.
Broken links are the potholes of a website. Visitors hit them, lose patience and leave, and search engine crawlers waste time on them instead of your real pages. Finding them by clicking every link is not realistic once a site has more than a handful of pages. A broken link checker does it in seconds.
Here is how to use the free SeoSpidie broken link checker, what the results mean and how to decide what to fix first.
Step 1: Choose the pages to check
Start where broken links do the most harm:
- Your homepage and main menu pages
- Pages that bring in the most traffic (see Search Console or your analytics)
- Product, pricing and contact pages
- Older blog posts, which link to external sources that may have disappeared
Step 2: Run the check
Paste a page URL into the broken link checker and run it. The tool reads the page, collects every link and tests each one, then lists them with their status. Internal and external links are both checked, so you also catch dead references to other websites.
Step 3: Read the results
- 200 OK โ the link works.
- 301 / 302 โ the link works but redirects. Not broken, but worth updating if it is one of your own links, because every redirect is an extra hop.
- 404 / 410 โ the target is gone. This is a broken link.
- 5xx โ the target server had an error. Recheck later before acting; it may be temporary.
- Timeout or blocked โ some sites refuse automated requests. Open the link in your browser to confirm before you remove it.
Step 4: Fix in order of impact
- Navigation and calls to action. A broken menu item or buy button affects every visitor.
- Internal links in content. Update them to the page's current URL. If the page no longer exists, link to the best alternative or remove the link.
- Your own redirected links. Replace them with the final URL so visitors skip the hop. The redirect checker shows you where each one ends up.
- External links. Find an updated source, link to an archived copy if the content matters, or remove the link.
If a page you deleted still has links from other websites, do not just leave it broken: set up a 301 redirect to its closest replacement. Our guide on whether broken links hurt SEO explains when to redirect and when to let a page return 404.
Don't forget images
A missing image does not show as an obvious error โ the page loads, just with a blank space or a tiny broken icon. Check important image URLs with the image URL checker, especially product photos and the images used in social sharing.
A simple monthly routine
You do not need a complicated process. Once a month, check your top ten pages with the broken link checker, glance at the 404 list in Search Console, and fix what you find. After any redesign or big content clean-up, check every page whose URL changed. For a wider health check of a page โ titles, headings, images and links together โ run a free site audit report.
Related guides
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Frequently asked questions
Does the broken link checker scan my whole website?
It checks all the links on the page you enter. Run it on your key pages one by one, starting with the most visited.
Why does a link show as broken when it opens in my browser?
Some websites block automated requests or require cookies. If the link works for you in a normal browser, it is not broken for visitors.
Do I need to fix broken links to sites I do not control?
You cannot fix their site, but you can update or remove your link to it. That keeps your content trustworthy.
Is there a limit on how many pages I can check?
No sign-up or payment is needed. Check as many pages as you like, one at a time.