Free Broken Link Checker for WordPress
WordPress sites accumulate broken links faster than most: every permalink change, deleted post, swapped plugin, and dead outbound link leaves a 404 behind. Left unchecked, they waste crawl budget, leak link equity, and send visitors to dead ends.
Dead Link Crawler scans your entire WordPress site the way a search engine does, no plugin required. Enter your URL and it checks every internal and external link, then hands you a report showing each broken URL, its status code, the anchor text, and the exact page it was found on.
Scan your WordPress site for broken links
Free to use. No sign-up required.
Why broken links pile up on WordPress
Permalink and slug changes
Editing a post slug or switching your permalink structure changes every URL for that content. Any internal link, menu item, or inbound backlink pointing at the old address now returns a 404 unless you add a redirect.
Deleted or trashed posts and pages
Removing content without repointing the links to it strands every reference. This is especially common after content pruning or migrating away from an old page.
Plugin and theme changes
Deactivating a plugin or switching themes can drop pages, shortcodes, and asset URLs those plugins generated, turning links that once worked into dead ends.
Rotting outbound links
Posts that link out to other sites slowly break as those destinations move or shut down. You do not control them, so the only way to catch them is to re-scan periodically.
How to fix broken links on WordPress
Add 301 redirects for moved content
For internal links to pages you have moved, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. The free Redirection plugin or an SEO plugin like Rank Math or Yoast Premium makes this a two-field job, and a 301 preserves the link equity.
Update or remove internal links
Use the "Found on page" column in your report to jump straight to the page holding each broken link, then edit the link in the block editor to point somewhere useful or remove it.
Fix outbound links
For dead external links, find the destination's new home (the Wayback Machine helps) and update the URL, or swap in a better resource. Remove the link if nothing suitable remains.
Re-scan on a schedule
New link rot appears constantly. Sign in and set up monitoring so Dead Link Crawler re-checks your WordPress site automatically and flags fresh broken links before your visitors hit them.
WordPress broken link checker FAQ
- Do I need to install a WordPress plugin?
- No. Dead Link Crawler runs entirely in your browser and crawls your live site over the web, so there is nothing to install, no database bloat, and no performance hit on your server.
- Will scanning slow down my site?
- No. The crawler is polite: it limits concurrent requests, spaces them out, and honors your robots.txt, so it behaves like a well-mannered search engine rather than a load test.
- Does it check images and other assets?
- It checks the links in your pages, including linked images and files. Broken images and downloads show up in the report alongside broken hyperlinks.
- How often should I check a WordPress site?
- A monthly scan catches most link rot before it piles up. Busy blogs and sites that publish daily benefit from weekly checks, which monitoring can run for you automatically.