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How to Find Broken Links on Your Website

A client once messaged me confused about a sudden drop in rankings, and it turned out a redesign two months earlier had quietly broken about 40 internal links without anyone noticing. Broken links are one of those problems that hide in plain sight, since nobody clicks every link on every page as a matter of habit. The good news is you don’t have to either, there are tools built specifically to hunt these down for you.

What You’ll Need Before You Start

Depending on the size of your site, you can get by with nothing more than a browser tab, or you might want a heavier desktop tool. Here’s what covers most situations:

  • Your site’s homepage URL, at minimum, to point any crawler tool at
  • A free Google Search Console account connected to your site, if you don’t have one already
  • Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free for up to 500 URLs) if your site has more than a couple dozen pages

📝 Note: A “broken link” usually means the linked page returns a 404 Not Found error, but it can also mean a 500 server error, a link pointing to a domain that no longer exists, or a redirect chain that eventually leads nowhere.

Step 1: Run a Free Online Broken Link Checker

For a quick first pass, a browser-based tool like Dead Link Checker or the W3C’s Link Checker is the fastest option. Paste in your homepage URL, and the tool crawls your site’s linked pages automatically, flagging anything that returns an error.

These tools are genuinely convenient for small sites, but they tend to slow down or hit crawl limits on anything with more than a few hundred pages. Think of this step as a fast sanity check, not your final audit.

💡 Tip: Most of these free checkers let you export results as a CSV. Grab that export even for a small site, it saves you from re-running the scan later when you’re ready to fix things.

Step 2: Check Google Search Console for 404 Errors

This step catches something the tools above can’t, links pointing to your site from other websites that no longer resolve. Log into Search Console, click Pages in the left sidebar under Indexing, and scroll to the “Why pages aren’t indexed” section. Look for the row labeled Not found (404).

Click that row and you’ll get a full list of URLs Google has tried to crawl and failed to find. This matters more than it sounds like it should, since these are pages Google already knows about, meaning the broken links are actively hurting your crawl budget and possibly your rankings.

⚠️ Warning: Not every 404 in this report is actually a problem. Old pages you intentionally removed are supposed to return a 404. Only worry about ones that used to be valuable pages or that other sites are still linking to.

Step 3: Run a Full Site Crawl With Screaming Frog

For anything beyond a small brochure site, this is the tool I reach for first. Download Screaming Frog SEO Spider, install it, and paste your homepage URL into the bar at the top, then click Start.

Once the crawl finishes, click the Response Codes tab and filter by Client Error (4xx) in the dropdown. That gives you every broken internal and external link on your entire site in one list, along with the exact page each broken link was found on, which you’ll need for the fix step later.

📝 Note: The free version caps out at 500 crawled URLs, which covers plenty of small to mid-sized sites. Larger sites will need the paid license or a cloud-based alternative like Ahrefs Site Audit.

Step 4: Manually Spot-Check Your Key Pages

Automated tools miss things sometimes, especially links buried inside JavaScript-rendered content or links behind a login. For your homepage, main navigation, and top 5 or so highest traffic pages, it’s worth just clicking through every link by hand once a quarter.

Pay particular attention to footer links, since those appear on every page of your site and a single broken footer link multiplies into a site-wide issue instantly.

Once you’ve got your list, you’ve got three real options for each broken link. Update the link to point to the correct current URL, if the destination content still exists somewhere else. Set up a 301 redirect from the old broken URL to the closest relevant page, if the content is genuinely gone. Or remove the link entirely, if neither of those makes sense.

I’d recommend updating the link directly whenever possible rather than relying on a redirect. Redirects work, but they add an extra hop that slows the page load slightly and it’s one more thing that can break later if the redirect rule ever gets removed.

✅ Tip: If you’re on WordPress, plugins like Redirection make setting up 301 redirects a simple form fill rather than editing server config files directly.

Pro Tips for Ongoing Link Health

  • Schedule a recurring crawl. Set a calendar reminder to run Screaming Frog or your checker tool of choice once a month, rather than waiting for someone to notice a problem.
  • Be extra cautious with external links to news sites or smaller blogs, they change URL structures or shut down far more often than large established domains.
  • Before removing or renaming any page on your own site, search your own content for internal links pointing to it first, so you’re not creating new broken links with your own changes.
  • Keep an eye on Search Console after any site migration or URL structure change. This is when broken link counts spike the hardest, and catching it early saves a lot of cleanup later.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

  • Only checking internal links. External links you’ve placed on your own pages break just as often, usually because the other site changed something, not you.
  • Redirecting every broken link to your homepage. This is a lazy fix that hurts user experience, redirect to the most relevant existing page instead.
  • Treating intentional 404s as errors. Not every 404 needs fixing, some pages are supposed to be gone.
  • Running one audit and never again. Link rot is constant, sites you linked to a year ago can vanish without any warning.

Quick Recap

Run a free online checker for a fast pass, review Search Console’s 404 report for real-world crawl errors, use Screaming Frog for a full site crawl, spot-check key pages by hand, then update, redirect, or remove each broken link you find.

Wrapping Up

Between an online checker, Search Console, and a proper crawl tool, you’ve now got a complete picture of where your site’s broken links are hiding and a clear way to fix each one. Set a recurring reminder to check again in a month, since link rot never really stops. A site with clean, working links isn’t just better for search engines, it’s a smoother experience for every visitor who clicks through.

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