Broken Link Checker (Basic)

Why broken links hurt SEO and UX

A broken link — a hyperlink that returns a 404, 500 or times out — is one of the fastest ways to lose trust with both visitors and Google. Users hit a dead end and bounce. Search engines waste crawl budget chasing pages that no longer exist. Internal broken links also break the flow of "link equity" through your site, reducing the ranking power of your most important pages.

Our free Broken Link Checker takes a list of URLs and pings each one through a public proxy, returning the HTTP status. Anything outside the 2xx range is flagged as broken so you can fix or redirect it. It's a basic tool — designed for quick batches of a few dozen URLs — perfect for auditing a blog post's outbound links or a landing page's CTAs before launch.

How to fix what we find

• 404 (Not Found): update the link, remove it, or set up a 301 redirect.
• 500 / 502 / 503: the destination server is broken — re-test later.
• 403 (Forbidden): often a bot block; the link may work in a real browser.
• Timeouts: usually slow servers — verify manually.

Round out your audit

After cleaning broken links, refresh your XML sitemap and robots.txt, re-run the Meta Tag Analyzer on key pages, and validate page structure with the Heading Checker.

Limits of this basic checker

• It checks the URLs you paste — it does not crawl your whole site automatically.
• Some servers block proxy requests, returning false positives. Always re-test manually.
• For large sites (1,000+ pages), use a desktop crawler like Screaming Frog.