10 Tools To Check Broken Links in Website

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Broken link checker tools are useful in keeping your website clean and free from broken links. Broken Links or Missing anchors and referenced objects in a Web page leads to many issues. Your blog readers or website customers will easily get irritated with broken links. After seeing a blank page or an error page with some wiered message people move away from your site. This will increase the bounce rate and decreases the page views.
Moreover broken link seems to be a factor which leads to a lower Google page rank. Broken links are normally happens because of deleted posts, images or moving a web resource to a different location without updating the anchor tag references pointing to it. So validating your site for broken link is essential for making your site user friendly and search engine friendly. At least you need to provide a custom 404 Error page if something goes wrong in your site.
Read:

• Website Usability and Quality Attributes -10 Point Checklist
• 7 Golden Tips For An Effective Website or Blog

There are many tools to check broken links in your website. Let us check the top 10 such tools in this article.

Top 10 broken link checker online and standalone tools

W3C Link Checker to find broken Links

W3C Link Checker Tool is from W3C and is part of the W3C’s validators and Quality Web tools. W3C Link Checker looks for issues in links, anchors and referenced objects in a Web page, CSS style sheet, or recursively on a whole Web site.
Try W3C Link Checker

Google webmaster tool

The Crawl errors page in Google webmaster central provides details about the URLs in your site that we tried to crawl but could not access.
To view crawl errors you cam login to Google webmaster tool and go to diagnostics and click Crawl errors. This page lists any URLs gogle had difficulty crawling,and will list the type of problem and list the page or pages on which crawler encountered error.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a nice tool to find broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. You can download and install the Xenu’s Link Sleuth in your PC and use it.
Get Xenu’s Link Sleuth

LinkChecker

LinkChecker is a free, GPL licensed URL validator. It uses recursive and multithreaded checking and output in colored or normal text, HTML, SQL, CSV, XML or a sitemap graph in different formats. The tool offers HTTP/1.1, HTTPS, FTP, mailto:, news:, nntp:, Telnet and local file links support. Provides username/password authorization for HTTP and FTP and Telnet as well as proxy support. It honors robots.txt exclusion protocol and offers Cookie support, HTML and CSS syntax check, Antivirus check etc. The tool offers different interfaces including command line, GUI and web interface.
Download and try LinkChecker

gURLChecker

gURLChecker is a graphical web link checker. It can work on a whole site, a single local page or a browser bookmarks file.
Download gURLChecker

iWebTool’s Broken Link Checker

Another simple tool to check for Broken Links on a website. The tool is from iWebTool and can be accessed from the below URL.
iWebTool’s Broken Link Checker

Online Broken Link Checker

Online Broken Link Checker is a free online Checker / Validator tool to find the broken links in your website. The tool not only tells you which of your hyperlinks are dead or broken but also show to indicate where exactly those anchor tags your HTML files.
Try Online Broken Link Checker

1-Hit Broken Link Checker

1-Hit Broken Link Checker is another service to check broken links. It checks both absolute and relative links. Also the broken in-page links and not existing backgrounds for your body and tables are also checked.
Try 1-Hit Broken Link Checker

Website Goodies Check Broken Links Tool

Another service to check broken links.
Try Check Broken Links

Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin

If your blogging platform is WordPress then you can give this plugin a try. This plugin will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found.
Try Broken Link Checker Plugin