How to Find Broken Links on a Website (5 Easy Ways)

A reader once emailed me to say my “contact” button was dead. It had been for weeks. The page it pointed to was renamed, the link never updated, and every visitor who clicked it hit a blank 404. That one broken link quietly turned away people who wanted to reach me. Learning how to find broken links on a website is the fix, and it takes minutes, not a weekend. Paste a URL into the free Pixellize Broken Link Checker and it crawls the page, checks every link, and lists the dead ones with their status codes. This guide covers what a broken link is, how to find them, why they hurt your SEO and your visitors, and exactly how to fix each kind.

What is a broken link?

A broken link, also called a dead link, is a hyperlink that points to a page that no longer loads. Clicking it returns an error instead of content, most often a 404 (page not found) and sometimes a 5xx server error. The link still looks normal, but the destination is gone, moved, or misspelled.

Status codes tell you what happened. A 404 means the page is missing. A 301 or 302 is a redirect, which is fine on its own but a problem if it chains or loops. A 500 means the server failed. According to the MDN HTTP reference, 404 is the standard “resource not found” response, which is why checkers flag it as the classic broken link.

Why do links break?

Links break for a handful of ordinary reasons, and knowing them helps you prevent repeats. Most come down to a URL changing on one end while the link stays the same.

• A page was renamed or its slug changed. The old URL now 404s.
• A page was deleted during a cleanup or redesign, with nothing pointing visitors elsewhere.
• A typo in the href. One wrong character and the link never resolves.
• An external site moved or shut down. You linked to a resource that no longer exists.
• A domain expired or switched from HTTP to HTTPS without redirects.

How to find broken links on a website

There are five easy ways to find broken links on a website, and the fastest is a free online checker: you paste a URL, it crawls the page or the whole site, checks every link it finds, and returns the broken ones with status codes. No install, no login. Start there, then reach for one of the other four ways below if your site is large.

1. Pixellize Broken Link Checker

Paste a URL into the free Pixellize Broken Link Checker and get a full broken-link report in three steps.

Step 1: Paste the URL and pick a mode

Enter the page or site address. Choose Single page for a quick check of one URL, or Whole website to crawl up to 100 pages. Leave “Check external links too” on so outbound links get tested as well.

Step 2: Run the scan

Click Check Links. The Pixellize checker fetches the page, collects every link, and runs a status check on each one. You see live counts for pages scanned, links checked, and links broken as it works.

Step 3: Read and export the broken-link report

When the scan finishes, you get a table of every broken link: the URL, the status code, the anchor text, whether it is internal or external, and the page it was found on. Export it as CSV or JSON to hand to a developer or work through yourself. In our own test scan of a sample page with six links, the Pixellize checker flagged three dead 404s in about five seconds.

2. A browser extension (MetaPilot)

For a quick check while you browse, install the free Pixellize MetaPilot Chrome extension. Open any page, run its one-click audit, then open the Links tab. It status-checks every link on the page and sorts them into All, Internal, External, Nofollow, and Broken, so one click on the Broken filter shows only the dead ones. Each link shows its HTTP status, and 404s, 5xx errors, redirects, and timeouts are color-coded so problems stand out.

Because it runs on the page you are viewing, it is the fastest way to spot-check a single page right after you edit it, with no URLs to paste. It skips wp-admin and login URLs so you do not get false 404s, and it runs locally with no data collection. Beyond links, the same one-click audit also flags missing image alt text, meta tags, and structured-data issues, so it doubles as a quick on-page SEO check.

3. Google Search Console

If the site is yours and verified, Google Search Console shows the broken internal URLs that Google has already crawled, for free. It only covers your own site’s internal links, misses external ones, and can lag by a few days, but it is the best record of what Google itself is hitting on your site. Here is exactly where to look.

Step 1: Open Indexing, then Pages

In the left menu, open Indexing and click Pages. Scroll to the “Why pages aren’t indexed” table and find the Not found (404) row. The number beside it is how many of your URLs currently return a 404.

Step 2: Open the 404 list and export it

Click the Not found (404) row to open the Examples list. You get the actual broken URLs, each with the date Google last crawled it. Use Export to pull the full list, then redirect or fix every URL on it.

One catch: Search Console only reports internal 404s and refreshes slowly, so pair it with a live scan from the Pixellize Broken Link Checker to catch external and freshly broken links too. The Google Search Central docs on HTTP errors explain how a missing page should return a real 404 so crawlers understand it is gone.

4. An SEO platform (Ahrefs)

Ahrefs runs a free Broken Link Checker as part of its free SEO tools. Enter a domain or URL, choose whether to include subdomains, and it checks the site for broken inbound and outbound links in seconds, with no account needed for the quick check.

For deeper work, a full Ahrefs account adds Site Audit, which crawls your whole site in the cloud and flags every broken internal and external link with the page it sits on, plus broken backlink reports so you can reclaim lost links. The free checker is great for a fast look, while the full feature set is paid. It is the most hands-off option once you already live in Ahrefs for the rest of your SEO.

5. The W3C Link Checker

The free W3C Link Checker is a no-signup web tool from the people who set web standards. Paste a page URL and it crawls the page, lists every link it checked, and flags the broken ones with their status code and the exact line in the HTML where each one sits, which makes the fixes easy to find.

It is handy for a quick, standards-based second opinion without signing up for anything. The trade-off is a plain, text-heavy report and slower scans on large pages, so it suits spot-checks more than a full site sweep.

Here is how the five ways compare at a glance.

Which should you use? For most people, start with the free Pixellize checker for a full scan, keep the MetaPilot extension handy for spot-checks while editing, lean on Search Console for what Google already flagged, and bring in Ahrefs for a hands-off whole-site audit and broken backlink reports.

Internal vs external broken links

Broken links come in two kinds, and you fix them differently. An internal broken link points to another page on your own site. An external one points to someone else’s site. The Pixellize checker labels each result so you know which is which.

Do broken links hurt SEO?

Broken links hurt SEO indirectly in three ways. They waste crawl budget when search bots hit dead URLs, they stop internal link equity from flowing to your real pages, and a site full of 404s reads as poorly maintained. The bigger hit is user experience: visitors who hit a dead end trust you less and leave faster.

Google has said broken links by themselves are not a direct ranking penalty. The real damage is downstream. A broken internal link to a strong page means that page gets less of the authority it should, and a chain of them makes a site look abandoned. The practical rule I use: treat broken internal links as an SEO problem and broken external links as a trust problem. Both are worth fixing, but internal ones move rankings.

How to fix broken links (redirect, update, or remove)

Once you have the list, each broken link gets one of three fixes. The right choice depends on why it broke and whether the old URL had any value.

For moved pages, a 301 redirect passes most of the old page’s authority to the new one. You can build the rule with the htaccess redirect generator, and if a redirect points to another redirect, clean it up with the guide on how to fix a redirect chain. For a full sweep across SEO, links, and images, the walkthrough on auditing a WordPress site ties it together.

How often should you check for broken links?

Check for broken links monthly for most websites, and weekly for large or fast-changing sites like news, stores, or active blogs. Also run a scan right after any redesign, a URL structure change, or a bulk content cleanup, since those are when links break in batches. A five-minute scan with the Pixellize checker beats a reader finding the dead link first.

Set a reminder so it actually happens. A monthly calendar event, or a scan tied to your existing analytics review, keeps link rot from building up quietly between big projects. The sites that stay clean are the ones that treat link checking as routine maintenance, like backups, rather than a task they do only after something visibly breaks.

Common mistakes when fixing broken links

• Redirecting everything to the homepage. Google treats a redirect to an unrelated page as a soft 404. Send it to the closest relevant page instead.
• Ignoring external links. A dead outbound link still frustrates readers and dents trust, so run the Pixellize scan with external checking on.
• Fixing once and forgetting. Links keep breaking as other sites change, so make the scan a habit, not a one-off.
• Blocking 404 URLs in robots.txt. That hides the problem from crawlers rather than solving it.
• Leaving a real missing page on a 200 status. A page that is gone should return 404, not a soft 404, so tools and search engines know.

Fix broken links before they cost you traffic

You now know what breaks links, why they matter, and how to fix each kind. Start with one scan today: paste your URL into the Pixellize Broken Link Checker, work through the 404s, redirect the pages worth saving, and fix the rest. A short scan every month keeps your site clean for visitors and search engines alike, and a clean 301 from the redirect generator saves the authority of any page that moved. That is the whole of how to find broken links on a website, so run your first scan now and clear the dead ends before they cost you traffic.