Why we built this
Broken links are one of the most common and most fixable problems on the web. They hurt SEO rankings, frustrate visitors, and quietly erode trust in a site — but most site owners don't realise how many they have until someone complains. Paid tools to catch them are expensive, and free ones often cap crawls at a handful of pages or block external link checking altogether.
We built Broken Link Finder to scratch our own itch: point it at a page, and get a clean report of every link on it that's broken, redirecting, or timing out — without a signup or an upsell. It checks each link with a real HTTP request rather than a status-code lookup, so it catches soft 404s and dead hosts that simpler tools miss. To be clear about scope: it scans the single page you give it, up to 150 links. It is not a whole-site crawler and does not follow internal links to other pages.
How the scanner works
When you submit a URL, we fetch the page using a real HTTP request, parse the HTML for every <a href> element, resolve relative and protocol-relative URLs to absolute ones, deduplicate the list, and then check each link in parallel batches. For each link we record the HTTP status code, response time, redirect chain (if any), and the anchor text from the original page. Links are categorised as working (2xx), redirect (3xx), broken (4xx/5xx), or timeout/error. We cap each scan at 150 links per page to keep response times fast — most pages have far fewer, and pages with more usually have a structural issue worth addressing separately.
Two technical details worth knowing about. First, we deliberately do not follow redirects when checking links — we want to show you that a link is a 301 or 302, not hide that fact by reporting only the final destination. Second, we send a HEAD request first to save bandwidth, then fall back to a GET request (with a small range header) for servers that don't support HEAD. This catches a category of broken links that simpler tools miss.
Who's behind it
The tool is built and maintained by a small independent Australian web development studio run by Jason Williams, who has been building for the web since 2000. We use this scanner ourselves when auditing client sites, and we've kept it free and signup-free because we think tools developers use every day should be that way. It checks up to 150 links per page and is rate-limited per visitor, so that one automated client cannot take it down for everyone else.
Our other free tools
Broken Link Finder is one of a small suite of free, no-signup tools we maintain for developers and site owners:
- Site Speed Check — measure page load performance and Core Web Vitals.
- Meta Tag Checker — audit a page's meta tags, Open Graph, and schema.
- SSL Checker — inspect a site's TLS certificate, chain, and expiry.
- DMARC Dashboard — check and monitor your email authentication records.
Get in touch
Found a bug? Got a feature request? Want to tell us about a site we scanned incorrectly? Head to our contact page and send us a message — we read every one.