Broken Link Checker for a Single Page

A page with even a handful of broken links looks unmaintained to both visitors and search engines, and the older a page gets, the more likely a link on it points somewhere that has since moved or disappeared entirely. This tool fetches a page's actual HTML, extracts every real link on it, and checks each one concurrently, surfacing exactly which links are broken, which redirect, and which still work, in one pass rather than clicking through every link by hand.

How links are actually extracted from the page

Rather than asking you to paste a list of URLs, this tool fetches the page's live HTML and parses it directly, finding every anchor tag's href attribute, resolving relative links, like /about or ../pricing, against the page's own URL so every checked link is a real, absolute address. Links that aren't actually navigable, javascript: handlers, mailto: and tel: links, and empty anchor placeholders, are automatically filtered out, since checking their HTTP status makes no sense, they were never meant to be fetched as a URL in the first place.

Why HEAD requests are tried first

Checking whether a link works only requires its status code, not its actual content, and an HTTP HEAD request asks a server for exactly that, headers and a status code, without transferring the page's full body. This tool tries a HEAD request for every link first, since it's meaningfully lighter and faster at scale than downloading full content for dozens of links just to read a status code, and only falls back to a full GET request for the small number of servers that don't implement HEAD correctly, some return a 405 Method Not Allowed rather than actually answering it. This two-step approach checks a full page of links noticeably faster than a naive GET-everything approach would.

Internal versus external, and why the distinction matters

Every checked link is tagged internal or external based on whether its domain matches the page being scanned. A broken internal link is entirely within your control to fix directly, while a broken external link, one pointing to a source that has moved or been taken down elsewhere, needs either updating to a working replacement or removing outright, since it's outside your ability to fix at the source. The skip external links option limits checking to internal links only, both faster and more considerate of the pages you're actually testing against, useful when you specifically want to audit your own site's internal link health without generating traffic toward every external site you happen to link to.

What counts as broken, versus a redirect

Any link returning a 4xx or 5xx status code, or failing to resolve to any response at all, is grouped under broken, these are the links that genuinely need fixing. A link returning a 3xx redirect status still technically works, the destination is just not exactly where the link points, grouped separately since a working redirect is a much lower priority fix than an actual broken link, though updating a link to point directly at its final destination rather than through a redirect is still good practice where it's easy to do.

Runs through a small server-side proxy

Both fetching the page itself and checking each link happen through a small server-side proxy, since reading cross-origin responses isn't possible directly from a browser tab. Links are checked with limited concurrency to avoid overwhelming the page or the sites it links to, and nothing about the page or its links is logged or stored beyond completing the scan. If you want to check a single URL's full response headers and redirect chain in more detail, our HTTP Header & Status Code Checker is built for that, part of the same Technical SEO Tools collection this tool belongs to.