How to Find Broken Links on a Website (5 Free Methods)

Broken links accumulate on every website. Pages get deleted, URLs change, external sites shut down, and suddenly your visitors are hitting 404 errors you never knew existed. The good news: finding them is straightforward, and you don't need to pay for an enterprise SEO suite to do it.

This guide covers five ways to find broken links on a website, from fully automated crawlers to quick manual checks.

Method 1: Use a free broken link checker (fastest)

The quickest way to find every broken link on your site is to let a crawler do it. A broken link checker visits your site the same way Google does: it starts at your homepage, follows every internal link, and tests every URL it finds, including outbound links to other websites. Anything that returns an error gets flagged.

With Dead Link Crawler, the process takes one step:

Paste your website URL and hit scan. No account or install required.
Watch broken links stream in live as the crawl runs.
For each dead link, you'll see the broken URL, its HTTP status code (404, 410, 500, or a timeout), the anchor text, and the exact page where the link appears.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Knowing a URL is broken is only half the job; you need to know which page contains the broken link so you can actually fix it. Every result includes the "found on" page for exactly that reason.

Your crawl is saved automatically, so when you fix the links and re-scan next month, you can compare reports and confirm the count went down.

Method 2: Google Search Console (finds what Google found)

Google Search Console is free and shows you the crawl errors Googlebot encountered on your site. Open Indexing → Pages and look at the "Not found (404)" section.

Two caveats:

Search Console only reports URLs Google tried to crawl. It won't show you broken outbound links to other websites, and it can lag days or weeks behind reality.
It reports broken destination pages, but it's poor at telling you which of your pages link to them.

Use Search Console as a safety net, not as your primary broken link finder. It's most useful for spotting inbound links from other sites that point to pages you've deleted (those deserve 301 redirects).

Method 3: Check your analytics for 404 pageviews

If your 404 page has a distinct title or URL, you can find it in your analytics tool and see which broken URLs real visitors are actually landing on. This won't find every broken link, but it ranks the damage: a dead link getting fifty hits a week is more urgent than one nobody clicks.

Method 4: Browser extensions (single-page checks)

Extensions like Check My Links highlight broken links on the page you're currently viewing. They're handy for spot-checking a single article before you publish it, but they can't crawl your whole site, and they run in the browser, which means cross-origin requests to external sites sometimes produce false positives. A server-side crawler avoids that problem entirely.

Method 5: Manual clicking (don't)

Clicking every link by hand works for a five-page site and nothing else. A 100-page website can easily contain several thousand links. This is a job for automation.

What to do with the broken links you find

Finding broken links is step one. Fixing them:

Internal link to a moved page: set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.
Internal link to a deleted page: update the link to point somewhere useful, or remove it.
External link to a dead site: replace it with a live alternative, or link to an archived copy on the Wayback Machine.

For the full rundown of why this matters for rankings, see why broken links hurt your SEO.

Keep them from coming back

A one-time cleanup fixes today's problem, but link rot never stops. New broken links appear every time you restructure content or an external site goes offline. Instead of remembering to re-check manually, set up a scheduled monitor: Dead Link Crawler can re-crawl your site automatically and email you when a new dead link appears.

Ready to see what's broken? Run a free broken link check now →