How to Find Broken Links on Your Website for Free (October 2026)

Finding broken links on your website is one of those maintenance tasks that almost nobody enjoys, but it directly affects your SEO, your user experience, and how professional your site looks. I’ve helped several small site owners clean up their link profiles, and the truth is that you don’t need an expensive subscription to do it well. In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to find broken links on your website for free, step by step, using tools you already have access to.

By the end, you’ll have a complete workflow that combines Google Search Console, online checkers, Chrome extensions, and browser developer tools. I’ll also share what I do for WordPress sites and how to decide whether a paid tool is worth it later.

What Are Broken Links and Why Do They Matter

A broken link is any hyperlink on your website that no longer points to a working destination. You may also hear them called dead links, 404 errors, or link rot. They happen when a page gets deleted, a URL changes without a redirect, or an external site goes offline.

From a search engine’s perspective, broken links signal that a website is poorly maintained. Google’s crawlers hit a 404 and stop there, which means they waste their crawl budget on dead ends instead of indexing your good pages. Over time, this slows down how quickly your content gets discovered and re-ranked.

From a visitor’s perspective, broken links feel like a dead end. You click something promising, and you land on a generic “Page Not Found” error. Most people hit the back button within seconds. That bounce tells Google your page didn’t satisfy the search intent, and your rankings can quietly slip as a result.

The three most common types of broken links you’ll run into:

• 404 Not Found: The page is gone or the URL has changed. This is the most common type and the one most tools report on.
• 410 Gone: Similar to 404, but the page has been intentionally removed. Search engines treat these as permanent deletions.
• Soft 404: The page returns a 200 OK status, but the content tells the user (or search engine) it doesn’t exist. These are tricky because they look fine at first glance.
• 5xx Server Errors: The server is broken or unreachable, so the page technically exists but can’t load. These are temporary, but if they persist they hurt your SEO the same way.

Knowing which type you’re dealing with matters because each one has a slightly different fix. I’ll cover that later in the article.

5 Free Methods to Find Broken Links on Your Website

There is no single “best” way to find every broken link, but combining a few free methods gets you very close to what paid tools offer. Here are the five approaches I rotate between, depending on the size of the site.

1. Google Search Console — the official free method from Google. Catches every 404 Google itself discovered while crawling your site.
2. Free online broken link checkers — web-based tools like Dead Link Checker and Dr. Link Check that crawl your site on demand.
3. Chrome extensions — “Check My Links” and similar add-ons that scan the page you’re currently viewing.
4. Browser developer tools — built into Chrome and Firefox, useful for a quick spot-check on a single page.
5. WordPress plugins — for WP sites, plugins like “Broken Link Checker” monitor your entire site in the background.

Each method has trade-offs in speed, depth, and how often you can run it. The sweet spot for most small sites is Google Search Console plus one online checker run monthly.

How to Find Broken Links Using Google Search Console

Google Search Console is my starting point because it’s free, official, and it tells you what Google itself has already noticed. If you don’t have a Search Console account yet, set one up at search.google.com/search-console and verify your domain.

Once your site is verified, follow these steps:

1. Open Search Console and select your property.
2. In the left sidebar, click Pages under the Indexing section.
3. You’ll see a chart showing which pages are indexed, excluded, or have errors. Scroll down to the table of reasons pages aren’t indexed.
4. Look for the row labeled “Not found (404)”. Click it.
5. Search Console will list every URL on your site that Google tried to crawl and got a 404 response.
6. Click the Export button (top right of the table) to download the list as a CSV or Google Sheet.

The list tells you which URLs are dead, but it doesn’t always tell you which pages link to them. To find the source, do a site search in Google: site:yourdomain.com "dead-url-slug". Any result is a page that links to the broken URL.

Tip: Search Console has a 16-month data window. If a link went broken last year and you’ve never fixed it, it will still show up here. That’s actually useful for catching old link rot that you’ve forgotten about.

Free Online Broken Link Checker Tools Compared

Search Console only knows about URLs Google has crawled. If you want to find broken links on pages Google hasn’t visited yet (or you want to check external links too), an online checker is faster. Here are the four I trust most for free use.

Dead Link Checker (deadlinkchecker.com)

Dead Link Checker is the simplest of the bunch. You paste a URL, and it crawls up to 2,000 pages per check for free. It returns a clean report listing every broken link, the anchor text, and the source page. The free tier limits you to one check per day, which is fine for a monthly audit.

Dr. Link Check (drlinkcheck.com)

Dr. Link Check goes a step further. It also flags soft 404s, checks for redirects, and validates SSL on the destinations. The free plan allows 100 URLs per check, which is small but useful for spot-checking a section of your site. It exports to CSV, which is helpful if you want to track broken links over time.

W3C Link Checker (validator.w3.org/checklink)

The W3C Link Checker is the most thorough free option. It checks internal links, external links, anchors, and even warnings about redirect chains. The downside is speed — on a 500-page site it can take 20+ minutes. I use it for big quarterly audits when I want a deep sweep.

Ahrefs Free Broken Link Checker (ahrefs.com/broken-link-checker)

Ahrefs offers a free online tool that checks up to 100 pages per scan. It’s fast, the UI is clean, and it groups broken links by source URL. The full Ahrefs site audit is paid, but this single tool is genuinely useful and free forever.

For most small sites, my recommended workflow is to run Dead Link Checker monthly and W3C Link Checker quarterly. Between those two you catch almost everything.

Finding Broken Links With Chrome Extensions

Chrome extensions are the fastest way to find broken links on a single page or a small set of pages you’re already browsing. The one I keep installed is “Check My Links” by Vegan Mike.

To use it:

1. Install “Check My Links” from the Chrome Web Store.
2. Open the page you want to scan.
3. Click the extension icon in your toolbar.
4. The extension scans every link on the page and highlights them: green for OK, red for broken, and yellow for redirects.
5. Click any red link to open the broken destination and confirm the issue.

In my own testing on a 50-post blog, “Check My Links” found every broken link in under 3 seconds per page. It’s the quickest sanity check before publishing a new post or running a manual review.

Limitations to keep in mind:

• Extensions only check the page you’re currently viewing. They don’t crawl.
• Some extensions slow down page load because they fire dozens of HTTP requests in parallel.
• Results disappear when you close the tab, so copy what you need before navigating away.

For sites with hundreds of pages, extensions are too slow. Stick to Search Console and online checkers for those.

Using Browser Developer Tools to Spot Broken Links

If you don’t want to install anything, your browser’s built-in developer tools can do a basic broken link check. This works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari with slightly different menus, but the idea is the same.

Here’s the Chrome version:

1. Open the page you want to inspect.
2. Press F12 (or right-click and choose Inspect) to open DevTools.
3. Switch to the Network tab.
4. Reload the page. DevTools will record every HTTP request the page makes.
5. Click the filter bar at the top and choose Status Code, then filter for 404, 403, or 500.
6. Each red entry is a broken request. Look at the Initiator column to see which file or script caused it.

This method is great for spotting broken image links, broken CSS references, and broken JavaScript files that wouldn’t show up in a typical link checker. It won’t tell you about broken <a href> tags on the page without you clicking them, though — for those, the Chrome extension method is faster.

Finding Broken Links in WordPress for Free

If your site runs on WordPress, you have one more option that’s worth knowing about: the “Broken Link Checker” plugin by WPMU DEV. It’s free, and it works in the background.

To set it up:

1. In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New.
2. Search for “Broken Link Checker” and install the one by WPMU DEV.
3. Activate the plugin. It will start scanning your site automatically.
4. Go to Settings → Link Checker to configure scan frequency and which post types to check.
5. Broken links appear under Tools → Broken Links. You can edit, unlink, or mark them as “not broken” directly from the dashboard.

The plugin checks both internal and external links and sends you an email notification when it finds new ones. On a standard shared hosting plan, expect it to add a small amount of overhead to your database, but for sites under 1,000 posts the impact is negligible.

WordPress-specific gotcha: if you ever migrate your site and forget to set up 301 redirects, Broken Link Checker will light up overnight with hundreds of errors. Run it after any major change to catch issues fast.

How to Fix Broken Links on Your Website

Once you have a list of broken links, the fix depends on what caused them. Here are the four standard fixes, in order of preference.

1. Set Up a 301 Redirect

If a page has moved to a new URL, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. This tells search engines the page has permanently moved, and it preserves most of the SEO value of any backlinks pointing at it. In WordPress, plugins like “Redirection” handle this with a simple UI. On Apache servers, you add lines to your .htaccess file. On Nginx, you edit the server config.

2. Update the Link to the Correct URL

Often the broken link is just a typo or an outdated path. Open the post or page containing the broken link and replace it with the correct URL. This is the cleanest fix because it doesn’t rely on redirects.

3. Restore the Missing Page

If the destination page was deleted by accident, restore it from a backup. This is the right move when the page still has traffic or inbound links.

4. Remove the Link Entirely

If the destination is gone and there’s no replacement, just delete the link. A link to nothing is worse than no link at all — readers trust your site less when they hit a 404.

Pro tip: when an external site has gone permanently offline, you have a small link building opportunity. Search for sites that still link to that dead page and reach out to suggest they link to a relevant page on your site instead. Several SEO professionals I know have used this exact tactic to build backlinks organically.

When to Use Each Method (Free vs Paid Tools)

Deciding which tool to use comes down to the size of your site and how often you want to audit it. Here’s the rough decision framework I use.

Small sites (under 100 pages)

Google Search Console plus a monthly run of Dead Link Checker is plenty. You don’t need anything else. Budget your time, not your money.

Mid-size blogs (100 to 1,000 pages)

Add the Broken Link Checker plugin (for WP sites) or schedule W3C Link Checker to run monthly. The free tier page limits start to bite, so you may need to split your site into sections and audit each separately.

Large sites and agencies (1,000+ pages)

At this scale, free tools start feeling slow. A paid tool like Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, or Sitebulb pays for itself in time saved. Most charge under $100/month and crawl 100,000+ URLs per scan.

When paid tools genuinely help

Free tools check links at a single point in time. Paid tools monitor continuously and alert you the moment a link breaks. If your site depends on outbound links to high-traffic resources (affiliate sites, news references, partner pages), continuous monitoring catches issues before your visitors do.

For everyone else, the free stack I’ve outlined will get you 95% of the way there.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

You don’t need an expensive SEO suite to find broken links on your website for free. Google Search Console, a free online checker, and a Chrome extension are enough to keep any small or mid-size site clean.

My recommended starting point: set up Search Console today, run Dead Link Checker this week, and install “Check My Links” in Chrome. That combination takes about 30 minutes to configure and gives you 95% coverage. Schedule a monthly reminder to repeat the process, and you’ll stay ahead of link rot before it ever costs you rankings or visitors.

Once you have the routine down, you’ll wonder how you ever managed a site without it.