How to Find Broken Links on Your Website
Broken links accumulate on any active website. Learn the most practical ways to find them, from manual checks to automated crawlers.
Finding broken links manually is not practical. On a small website with a handful of pages it might be possible, but on any site that has grown over time — with blog posts, product pages, or lots of external links — clicking through every link by hand would take hours and you would still miss things.
This guide explains the most common approaches and when to use each one.
Checking links manually
For a single page or a very small website, you can go through links manually. Open the page, click each link, and check whether it loads. This works but does not scale. It also only covers the pages you remember to check — links buried in older posts or footer navigation are easy to forget.
Using browser extensions
Several browser extensions can highlight broken links while you browse. They check links on the current page as you visit it. This is useful for a quick check of individual pages but still requires you to visit every page yourself. It is not a full-site solution.
Using an online crawler
A crawler visits every page on your website automatically, follows every link it finds, and reports which ones return errors. This is the only practical approach for a complete picture of your website.
dislike404.com crawls your entire website and lists every broken link it finds, including the exact page where the broken link appears. That way you know not just that a link is broken, but where to go to fix it.
What to look for
When reviewing broken link results, pay attention to the difference between internal and external links:
Internal broken links — links pointing to other pages on your own website — are always worth fixing. They affect your visitors directly and can hurt your search engine rankings.
External broken links — links pointing to other websites — are worth reviewing too. If you link to a resource that no longer exists, your visitors land on an error page through no fault of their own. Removing or replacing those links is good housekeeping.
How often should you check?
Websites change constantly — your own content gets restructured, and external sites go offline or move their content without warning. A one-time check is a good start, but broken links accumulate over time. Running a scan regularly means you catch problems before your visitors do.