Find broken links, 404 errors, and empty pages on your website — instantly and for free
Every link on your website returns a status code. Here's what each one means and why it matters for your SEO and user experience.
The link is healthy and returns the expected page. This is the ideal status for all your internal and external links.
The page doesn't exist. This hurts SEO, wastes crawl budget, and frustrates visitors. Fix or remove these links immediately.
The server encountered an error serving the page. Usually a temporary issue, but repeated 500 errors signal hosting problems.
The page loads but has very little content. Google may penalise these as "thin content" — a known ranking factor.
The URL has permanently moved. Each redirect wastes a small amount of crawl budget and adds page load latency.
A temporary redirect. If the destination has been permanent for months, switch to a 301 to pass link equity correctly.
The server refuses the request. Often misconfigured file permissions or a page that requires authentication to access.
The server took too long to respond or is offline. Check your hosting if you see many timeouts on internal pages.
A comprehensive scan that goes far beyond simple 404 checking — we analyse every type of link and asset on your website.
Finds every internal link pointing to a non-existent page on your own domain. These are the most damaging for SEO because they break the link equity flow between your own pages.
Checks outbound links to other websites. Linking to dead external pages damages your credibility and signals poor content maintenance to search engines.
Detects images with broken src attributes — including images in subfolders, images with spaces in filenames, and images referenced with relative paths.
Identifies URLs that redirect to other URLs. Excessive redirect chains slow down your website and dilute PageRank passed through internal links.
Flags pages with very little text content. Google has explicitly stated that thin content pages can pull down the quality score of your entire website.
Checks that your stylesheets and JavaScript files are loading correctly. Broken CSS breaks page layouts; broken JS can disable interactive features.
Verifies .woff, .woff2, .ttf and .eot font files are accessible. Missing fonts cause text to render in fallback fonts, affecting your designed look.
Checks URLs referenced in og:image, og:url, and other meta tags. Broken OG images mean your pages look broken when shared on social media.
Download your complete link audit as a CSV file. Share reports with your team, track improvements over time, or import results into your SEO workflow.
Our crawler mimics a search engine bot to give you an accurate picture of what Googlebot actually sees when it visits your website.
Paste your website address and choose how many pages to scan (up to 200). You can also enable or disable external link checking.
The crawler visits your homepage, follows every internal link it finds, and builds a complete map of your site's pages and assets.
Each discovered URL is checked for its HTTP status code. Images, CSS, JS, and fonts are verified in fast parallel batches.
Results stream in real time. Filter by broken, empty, redirect, or working. Click any URL to see exactly which page it was found on.
Use the source viewer to find the exact line of code, fix your links, and export a full CSV report for your records.
Whether you manage a small blog or a large e-commerce site, broken links are costing you traffic, rankings, and revenue.
Broken links are not just a user experience problem — they directly affect how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks your website.
Google only crawls a limited number of pages per day. Every request Googlebot makes to a broken URL is a wasted crawl, meaning your new and updated pages get crawled less frequently.
Internal links pass "link equity" (PageRank) between pages. When a link points to a 404, that equity is lost entirely. Fixing or redirecting broken links recovers this lost ranking power.
Google evaluates site quality holistically. A site with many broken links signals poor maintenance and can lower the quality score applied to all pages — even ones with no broken links.
When users click a broken link and immediately leave, Google's behavioural signals register this as a poor experience. High bounce rates from broken destinations can suppress your rankings.
Google Search Console frequently flags 404 errors in the Coverage report. Many unresolved 404 errors can affect how Google perceives your site's health and may slow down indexing of new content.
Each redirect in a chain reduces the link equity passed through it by a small amount. Chains of 3+ redirects are also slower for users and less likely to be fully followed by crawlers.
Once you've found your broken links, here's the most effective way to fix them without creating new problems.
If a page has moved to a new URL, set up a 301 (permanent) redirect from the old URL to the new one. This preserves link equity and automatically sends users and crawlers to the right destination.
For internal broken links, updating the link itself (rather than adding a redirect) is always preferable. Redirects add latency; direct links are faster and cleaner for both users and crawlers.
Avoid spaces and special characters in image filenames. Use hyphens instead of spaces (e.g., guru-nanak.jpg not Guru Nanak.jpg). This prevents encoding issues across all browsers and servers.
External links break without warning when other sites restructure or close. Run a link check at least once a month, or before and after any major site update or CMS migration.
After fixing broken links and setting up redirects, submit your updated XML sitemap to Google Search Console. This signals to Google that your site has been cleaned up and prompts a fresh crawl.
Cross-reference your results with the "Pages" report in Google Search Console. GSC shows which 404 pages were discovered by Googlebot and have inbound links — these are the highest priority to fix.
See why our free link checker is the right choice for most website owners and SEO professionals.
| Feature | This Tool (Free) | Screaming Frog Free | Ahrefs Site Audit | Dead Link Checker |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, unlimited | Free (500 URLs) | Paid ($99+/mo) | Free (limited) |
| Pages per scan | Up to 200 | 500 (free tier) | Unlimited | Up to 2,000 |
| Image link checking | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | ✗ No |
| CSS / JS checking | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | ✗ No |
| Real-time streaming results | ✓ Yes | ✗ No | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| Source code viewer | ✓ Yes | ~ Limited | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| CSV export | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | ~ Paid only |
| No software to install | ✓ Yes | ✗ Desktop app | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Empty / thin page detection | ✓ Yes | ~ Paid only | ✓ Yes | ✗ No |
Everything you need to know about using our link checker and interpreting your results.
src="image.jpg" and the image is in the same folder as the HTML file, it will work in a browser. Our checker correctly resolves relative paths by combining them with the source page's directory. If an image is still showing as broken after our fix, it likely means the image file genuinely doesn't exist at that location on your server — check your FTP or file manager to confirm the file is there.