Online Web Tools for
Checking Broken Links

Online Web Tools for Checking Broken Links — Complete Guide 2026

Every website owner, blogger, and SEO professional needs access to reliable online web tools for checking broken links. Whether you manage a small personal blog or a large e-commerce website, broken links are a silent killer that damage your search engine rankings, frustrate your visitors, and erode the trust you have worked so hard to build. In this comprehensive guide, we will explain everything you need to know about broken links — what they are, why they happen, how they affect your SEO, and most importantly, how to find and fix them using free online tools.

According to a 2025 study by Ahrefs, over 66% of websites on the internet contain at least one broken link. Among websites older than three years, this number rises to over 80%. Despite being such a widespread problem, broken links are one of the most overlooked technical SEO issues. The good news is that with the right web tools for checking broken links, you can identify and fix these issues in minutes.

What Are Broken Links and Why Do They Happen?

A broken link — also called a dead link or dead URL — is a hyperlink on a webpage that no longer leads to a working destination. When a user clicks a broken link, they see an error page instead of the content they expected. The most common error is a 404 Not Found page, which tells the browser that the destination page does not exist on the server.

Broken links happen for several reasons, and understanding these causes helps you prevent them in the future:

• Page Deleted: The most common cause. A webpage is deleted from a website without setting up a redirect. Any links pointing to that page immediately become broken.
• URL Changed: The page still exists but its URL was changed — for example, a blog post was moved to a different category. Old links pointing to the previous URL become dead links.
• Website Shutdown: An external website you linked to has shut down or gone offline permanently. This is especially common with links to small blogs, startup websites, and social media profiles.
• Typos in URLs: A simple typing mistake when adding a hyperlink creates an instant broken link. Even one wrong character in a URL makes the link dead.
• Domain Changes: An external website migrated to a new domain without proper redirects in place, making all old links to that domain broken.
• HTTPS Migration: A website moved from HTTP to HTTPS but failed to update internal links, creating broken HTTP links.
• CMS Updates: WordPress, Joomla, or other content management system updates sometimes change permalink structures, breaking existing internal links.
• Expired Content: Product pages for discontinued items, event pages for past events, and promotional pages that have expired are frequently deleted without redirects.

How Broken Links Hurt Your SEO Rankings

The connection between broken links and SEO is direct and significant. Search engines like Google use links to discover and rank content. When your website contains broken links, it sends negative signals to search engine algorithms that affect how your site is crawled, indexed, and ranked.

1. Wasted Crawl Budget

Google allocates a specific crawl budget to every website — the number of pages Googlebot will crawl in a given time period. When Googlebot follows a broken link and receives a 404 error, that crawl request is wasted. For large websites, excessive broken links mean many important pages never get crawled or indexed. This directly impacts your ability to rank for target keywords.

2. Lost Link Equity (Link Juice)

When external websites link to a page on your site that no longer exists, all the authority and ranking power (link equity) from those backlinks is completely lost. This is one of the most damaging effects of broken links. A single high-authority backlink can be worth hundreds of lower-quality links — losing it to a dead page is a significant SEO setback.

3. Poor User Experience Signals

When visitors click a broken link and land on a 404 error page, they leave your website immediately. This increases your bounce rate — a metric Google uses as a signal of page quality and user satisfaction. High bounce rates from broken links send negative ranking signals to search algorithms, pushing your pages down in search results.

4. Reduced Crawling Efficiency

A website cluttered with broken links appears disorganized and poorly maintained to search engine crawlers. Google's Quality Rater Guidelines explicitly mention that websites with many broken links are considered lower quality. Over time, this perception reduces how often and how deeply Google crawls your site.

Types of Broken Links: Internal vs External

Not all broken links are the same. Understanding the two main types — internal and external — helps you prioritize which ones to fix first and how to approach the repair process.

Internal Broken Links

Internal broken links are links on your website that point to other pages on your own website that no longer exist or have changed URLs. These are the highest priority to fix because they are entirely within your control. Internal broken links directly disrupt the flow of link equity through your site and prevent search engines from properly crawling your content. You can fix internal broken links by updating the URL in your content or setting up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one.

External Broken Links

External broken links are links on your website that point to pages on other websites that have been deleted, moved, or shut down. These are harder to control because you depend on the target website to maintain their URLs. When you discover external broken links, your options are to remove the link entirely, replace it with a link to a different relevant source, or try to find the new URL of the moved content using the Wayback Machine or a search engine.

How to Check Broken Links on Your Website — Step by Step

Using online web tools for checking broken links is the most efficient way to audit your website for dead links. Here is a complete step-by-step process you can follow to systematically find and fix broken links:

1. Start with your homepage: Use Toolyfi's free broken link checker to scan your homepage first. The homepage typically has the most internal links to other sections of your site and is most frequently visited.
2. Check your most important pages: Scan your top 10 highest-traffic pages. These generate the most revenue and ranking potential, so keeping them free of broken links is critical.
3. Scan your blog archive: Blog posts often contain the most external links and are the most likely to have broken links due to older content referencing websites that have since shut down.
4. Check your resource pages: If you have a resources or tools page that links to external websites, these pages typically have the highest concentration of external broken links.
5. Review navigation menus: Broken links in navigation menus affect every single page of your site and should be fixed immediately.
6. Document all broken links: Keep a spreadsheet of all broken links found, noting the page they appear on, the broken URL, and whether it is internal or external.
7. Fix or redirect: For internal broken links, set up 301 redirects or update the URL. For external broken links, find a replacement source or remove the link entirely.
8. Verify the fix: After making changes, re-run the broken link checker to confirm all issues have been resolved.

Free Online Web Tools for Checking Broken Links — Comparison

There are several free tools available for checking broken links. Here is how they compare, including Toolyfi's own free broken link checker:

How to Fix Broken Links — Complete Guide

Finding broken links is only half the battle. Once you have identified them using an online web tool for checking broken links, you need to fix them properly. Here are the best methods for repairing different types of broken links:

Method 1 — Update the URL

The simplest fix for an internal broken link is to update the hyperlink in your content to point to the correct, current URL. Log into your CMS, find the page containing the broken link, edit the link to the new working URL, and save. This is the preferred method for internal links because it eliminates the broken link entirely rather than adding a redirect layer.

Method 2 — Set Up a 301 Redirect

A 301 redirect tells browsers and search engines that a page has permanently moved to a new location. This is the best solution when you have changed a URL and want to preserve the link equity from all existing links pointing to the old URL. In WordPress, you can set up 301 redirects using plugins like Redirection or Rank Math. In Apache servers, add redirect rules to your .htaccess file.

Method 3 — Restore the Deleted Page

If a page was accidentally deleted, the best solution is to restore it. Most CMS platforms keep a trash or deleted items folder where recently deleted content can be recovered. Restoring the original page preserves all existing links without requiring any redirects or URL updates.

Method 4 — Replace With Relevant Content

For external broken links pointing to deleted third-party resources, find a similar, high-quality page on a different website and update your link to point there instead. This maintains the value of your outbound links for readers while removing the dead link that harms your SEO.

Method 5 — Remove the Link Entirely

Sometimes the content a broken link points to is no longer relevant or available anywhere on the internet. In this case, the cleanest solution is to simply remove the hyperlink from your text. The anchor text can remain as regular text, or you can update it to reference a different resource entirely.

Broken Links and Website Maintenance Best Practices

Fixing broken links reactively is important, but establishing proactive practices to prevent and catch broken links early is even better. Here are the best practices for maintaining a link-healthy website in 2026:

• Monthly link audits: Run a broken link check on your most important pages every month. Set a recurring calendar reminder to make this a consistent habit.
• Always set redirects when changing URLs: Whenever you change a page URL, immediately set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one before publishing the change.
• Use relative URLs for internal links: Internal links using relative URLs (/blog/post-name) are less likely to break during domain migrations than absolute URLs (https://domain.com/blog/post-name).
• Monitor Google Search Console: The Coverage report in Google Search Console highlights 404 errors that Googlebot has encountered while crawling your site.
• Be selective with external links: Only link to established, reliable websites that are unlikely to disappear. Avoid linking to social media posts, temporary promotional pages, or small personal blogs.
• Create a custom 404 page: Even with the best practices, some broken links are inevitable. A helpful custom 404 page that guides visitors back to relevant content reduces the damage when a broken link is encountered.
• Check links before publishing: Before publishing any new blog post or page, click every link you have included to verify it works correctly.

Broken Links Impact on User Experience

Beyond SEO, broken links significantly damage the user experience on your website. When a visitor clicks a link expecting to find helpful information or a product page and instead encounters a 404 error page, the experience is frustrating and erodes trust. Research from the Nielsen Norman Group shows that users who encounter a dead link are 40% less likely to return to that website. In e-commerce, broken links on product pages or checkout flows can directly result in lost sales.

The impact is even more pronounced on mobile devices where users are less likely to try typing a corrected URL or navigating back to find the content they were looking for. A mobile visitor who hits a broken link almost always leaves the site entirely.

Broken Link Checker for WordPress Websites

WordPress powers over 43% of all websites on the internet, making it the most common platform where broken links occur. WordPress users have several options for checking and fixing broken links beyond using an online web tool like Toolyfi:

• Broken Link Checker Plugin: This free WordPress plugin actively monitors all links on your site and notifies you when broken links are detected. It also allows you to unlink or edit broken links directly from the WordPress dashboard without having to edit each post individually.
• Rank Math SEO: The popular Rank Math SEO plugin includes a 404 monitor that tracks all 404 errors encountered by visitors and search engines on your site.
• Yoast SEO + Redirection: Yoast SEO paired with the Redirection plugin provides comprehensive control over your website's redirect management and broken link monitoring.
• Manual wp-admin check: You can also check for broken links manually by reviewing your posts and pages in the WordPress editor, though this is time-consuming for sites with a large amount of content.

Frequently Asked Questions — Broken Links