How to find broken links on your website

What counts as a broken link

Most people think of the "404 Page not found" error, but a link can fail in several ways. These are the kinds Link Check reports, worst first:

• Dead link: the page answers "Page not found" (a 404 error), the website doesn't exist any more, or it refuses visitors.
• Lands on "not found": the page loads, but it says "Page not found". Your web person may call this a "soft 404".
• Email link broken: the address is mistyped, or its domain can't receive email.
• Phone link broken: tapping it on a phone won't ring, often because of a letter O where a zero should be.
• Goes nowhere: a link meant to jump to part of the same page, where that part doesn't exist.
• Private address: a link left pointing at a test address on the designer's own computer.

Worth tidying, but not broken:

• Moved: the link works, but the page now lives at a new address. Update it before the old address stops working.
• Long way around: two or more redirects (automatic forwards) before it arrives. Slower, and more places for it to break.
• Not secure: a link to the http version of your own site, which can show "Not secure".

Find them, step by step

1. Check your home page. Paste its address into Link Check. It checks up to 10 links, the page's own content first, then the menu, header, sidebar and footer.
2. Check your busiest pages next: contact, events, and any page full of PDFs or forms, such as agendas or price lists.
3. Check the whole site. Link Check's whole-site check reads up to 10 pages of your site, checks up to 10 links on each, and emails you one report. It's free once a day; we email you a link to confirm first.
4. Ask Google. If your site is in Google Search Console, its Pages report lists addresses on your site that answered Not found (404), including old links from other websites. See Why isn't my website showing up on Google? to set it up.
5. Click the rest yourself. No checker reaches links behind a login or links inside PDFs, and some websites turn checkers away.

Where broken links hide

• Old news posts and past events that link to pages since removed.
• Links to other organizations' pages (a state agency, a supplier, a partner club), which move without telling you.
• PDFs replaced with a new file under a new name, while the old link still points at the old name.
• Menus and footers after a page was renamed.
• Phone numbers and email addresses after someone leaves.
• Links copied from the editor's preview, which point at a test address instead of the live site.

Fix each kind

• The page moved: change the link to the new address.
• The page is gone: remove the link, or point it at the nearest page that still helps.
• You moved one of your own pages: ask your web person for a redirect from the old address to the new one, so links from other websites and from Google keep working.
• Phone link: use only digits, with the area code.
• Email link: check the spelling after the @.
• Goes nowhere: ask your web person to add the missing part's name (its id) to the right heading, or change the link.

What each line of a report means, and how soon to fix it: Your PageKiwi report, explained.

Why it matters

• A visitor who hits a dead link usually gives up on what they came for: the form, the opening hours, the meeting agenda.
• Google doesn't keep pages that answer with a 404 error in its results. If you moved a page without a redirect, its old address drops out of search, and so do the visitors it brought.
• A broken phone or email link means a call or message that never reaches you, and you never hear about it.

How often to check

Check after you rename or remove a page, change the menu, or replace a PDF. Otherwise, once a month is plenty for most small sites.

Or let us check for you: Site Watch checks your home page's links every night and emails you only when something changes, such as a new dead link or one you've fixed. It also warns you before your padlock or domain name runs out.

When a checker gets it wrong

Every link checker, ours included, makes mistakes now and then:

• Some websites turn checkers away. We list those separately ("turned our checker away") instead of calling them broken, so try them yourself.
• A slow website can miss our 10-second limit and show as "No answer" when it works for people.
• A working page whose title mentions "404" or "page not found" for another reason can be flagged as landing on "not found".

If a finding looks wrong, click the link yourself. If it works, tell us and we'll look into it.