Broken link checker
Find the broken links on your website
Broken links accumulate quietly. A page gets renamed, an external site reorganises, a product is retired — and the links pointing at them keep sitting in your content for months. VeriFixScan follows the links your pages reference and reports the ones that no longer resolve, with the page each one was found on.
Internal and external links are different problems
An internal broken link is yours to fix and always worth fixing: it wastes crawl budget, it strands visitors, and it usually means a rename that was not followed through. An external broken link is somebody else's outage or somebody else's decision — you still want to know, but the fix is to update or remove the link rather than to repair the target.
Not every failure is a 404
A link can be broken because the target returns 404, because it returns a server error, because the host no longer resolves, or because the certificate expired. These need different fixes, so they are reported as different findings rather than lumped together as 'broken'. A link that disappears down a redirect chain is a case of its own, and the redirect checker is where that one is traced.
Links in the navigation deserve their own attention
A dead entry in a main menu or a footer appears on every page of the site at once, which makes it both the most damaging kind of broken link and the easiest to miss. The navigation and footer regions are analysed as regions, not just as more links in the pile.
Images and resources count too
A broken stylesheet or a missing image is a broken reference like any other, and it is more visible to a visitor than a dead link in a paragraph. They are verified alongside the links and reported separately, so you can tell a content problem from a deployment problem.
What gets verified
Link verification is not a single check. These are the ones that report on links, redirects and dead references.
Broken links
Verified links resolve without an error status.
Error responses
Crawled pages answered without a server error.
HTML sitemap (visitors)
Looks for a human-readable sitemap page. This is NOT sitemap.xml, which is audited by the SEO checks.
HTML quality
Flags markup problems that are unambiguous in the stored sample: duplicated ids, broken characters, placeholder text, dead links, nesting errors.
Broken images
Referenced images that really answered with an error or could not be fetched.
Broken resources
Referenced resources answering with an error status.
Main menu
Analyses the primary navigation: links, ARIA attributes, sub-menus and dead entries.
Footer
Detects the footer region and the essential links it should carry.
Links are verified on the pages the crawl reached, within the scan budget. A link on a page that was not crawled is not reported as working — it is simply not reported, and coverage is stated in the results.
Enter your website address and VeriFixScan analyses it straight away. No account, no installation, nothing to add to your site.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I check my website for broken links?
- Enter your URL in the free scan. The links found on the crawled pages are verified and any that fail are listed with the page they were found on.
- Does it check external links as well as internal ones?
- Yes. Both are verified, and the report tells you which is which, because the fix is different for each.
- Will it find 404 errors?
- Yes, and it separates a 404 from a server error and from a DNS failure, so you can see what actually went wrong rather than guessing.
- Can it check a large site?
- The free scan covers a sample. A full crawl covers far more pages, and the report states how much of the site the scan was able to reach.
- Do broken links hurt SEO?
- Broken internal links waste crawl budget and strand visitors on dead ends. That is a real cost, though it is one factor among many rather than a penalty on its own.