Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker pulls every link out of a page and checks where each one leads, separating the ones that are broken from the ones that only reach their target through a redirect.

Links are extracted from the HTML, mailto and tel and bare anchors dropped, relative hrefs resolved against the page's own final URL, and duplicates collapsed — then up to fifty unique targets are probed per run, so a link-heavy page needs more than one pass and the output states how many were left over. Broken entries are listed with their anchor text, which is usually what tells you where in the page to look, and generic anchors such as "click here" are counted separately. Treat a surprising failure sceptically: some sites answer an automated request with 403 or 429 while serving browsers normally.

This tool reaches further than the others on the site. ShortTrick's server fetches the page and then requests up to fifty of the links on it, which means up to fifty third-party sites each record a hit from our server — none from you, and none carrying anything out of your browser. Private and reserved addresses are refused, so an intranet link in the page is reported as blocked rather than probed, and nothing is retained once the report is built.

Finding dead external citations in an old article, checking a page's links after a site restructure, auditing a resources or link-roundup page, and spotting links that now redirect somewhere unintended.

Also known as: find broken links · check dead links · 404 link finder · scan website for broken links · broken link test · test broken link