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Free Broken Link Checker: Find and Fix Dead Links on Your Website

Updated March 2026 · 4 min read

Broken links are one of the most common — and most damaging — website problems. Every dead link on your site is a visitor hitting a wall and leaving. Google treats broken links as a signal that your site isn't well maintained, which quietly pushes your rankings down.

The worst part? You usually don't know they're there. Pages get deleted, URLs change, external sites go offline. Broken links accumulate silently.

Why broken links matter more than you think

They frustrate visitors. Someone clicks "View our services" and gets a 404 error page. They don't try again — they leave. If that link was on your homepage, you could be losing dozens of potential customers per week without knowing it.

They hurt your SEO. Google's crawlers follow every link on your site. When they find a dead end, it wastes your "crawl budget" — the limited attention Google gives your site. More broken links mean less of your actual content gets indexed.

They erode trust. A site with broken links looks abandoned or unreliable. If a visitor finds one dead link, they wonder what else is broken.

How to find broken links on your website

The fastest way is to run a free SiteBeat scan. Enter your URL and we'll crawl every page, check every link, and tell you exactly which ones are broken, where they are, and what they pointed to.

What our broken link checker reports:

• The broken URL — exactly which link is dead
• The source page — which page on your site contains the broken link
• The link text — what the clickable text says (so you can find it quickly)
• Whether it's internal or external — links to your own pages vs. links to other websites
• The HTTP status code — 404 (page not found), 410 (permanently removed), or 500 (server error)

How to fix broken links

Internal broken links (links to your own pages)

These are usually caused by deleted pages or changed URLs. The fix:

1. Go to the source page in your website editor
2. Find the link (use Ctrl+F to search for the link text)
3. Update the URL to point to the correct page
4. If the target page no longer exists, either recreate it or remove the link

External broken links (links to other websites)

These break when the external site changes or goes offline. Options:

• Find the new URL — the page may have moved. Google the page title to find its new location.
• Use the Wayback Machine — check web.archive.org to see what the page used to contain, then find an equivalent current resource.
• Remove the link — if no replacement exists, remove the link rather than leaving it broken.

Set up redirects for deleted pages

If you've deleted a page that other sites link to, set up a 301 redirect to the most relevant remaining page. This preserves the SEO value of those inbound links.

In WordPress: Install the "Redirection" plugin (free). Go to Tools → Redirection → add the old URL and the new destination.

Preventing broken links in the future

Broken links accumulate over time. The only way to stay on top of them is regular scanning. SiteBeat Pro includes weekly automated scans — if a new broken link appears, you get an email alert the same week.