Broken Link Checker Tool: Top 15 Online Dead Link Checking Tools in 2019
Broken Link Checker Tool – A Broken link checker plugin is the most important and efficient way to locate and fix broken links before it harms a website’s ranking and business prospects.  Broken links are common on WordPress websites. It happens when an original page is deleted or closed.
Broken links hurt SEO and fixing is very important just as sharpening other SEO factors.
Although searching and deleting broken links manually look easy when the volume of content is less, it is not practical when there is a hell of content.
Using broken link scanner plugin one can save from the danger of losing hard-earned customer base by avoiding the situation loyal users becoming frustrated. Broken links also damage online ranking and SEO.
A website under the broken link checker plugin will spot broken link called dead links pointing to a web page that is now hard to reach. There are free broken link checker plugins as well as premium plugins
Ignoring broken links is dangerous as it harms a website and brings a bad name to the website and effects internal and external links besides pulling down search engine rankings.
Things to note while adding Broken Link Checker plugin
Broken link checker checks broken links and addresses issues related to the migration of a website from one technology to others.  That may be like Joomla to WordPress or Magento to Joomla, etc.
There are many methods to find broken links plugin and the easiest path depends on the user. There are quite a few tools such as
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Dead Link Checker
- Broken Link Checker
- SEMrush
- Dr. Link Check
Top 15 Broken Link Checker Tool
1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
In the big crowd of broken link finder plugin SEO Spider is a powerful offline tool.
Since it is not an online tool download Screaming Frog SEO Spider and install on the computer. Once installed, just follow the steps to find broken links. Start with entering the website URL and click Start.
After scanning, the internal links with an HTTP response code and 404-status code will show up. If 404 is found, it needs fixing and must be known which post is having this link. So,  click on In-links at the bottom to find out source post.
To complete install of Broken Link Checker as a site broken link checker plugin, visit Settings » Link Checker page and start looking for broken links
Depending on the volume of content on a site, it takes time to go through posts and display results. Once done, the link will start showing the number of broken links.
The broken links can be seen by clicking on that link or going to Tools » Broken Links page.
For mitigation or curation of a broken link–edit a URL right from broken links page or edit the post to which they belong to.
After fixing broken links deactivate and uninstall the plugin. This is because broken Link Checker is a resource-intensive plugin and continuous use can slow down the website.
2. Link Valet         Â
Among the best-broken link checker plugin, there is Link Valet that spiders a site and produces reports on all the broken links.
Just enter the link of an HTML page it will produce a report on it.
Whenever it references another HTML page in the same site a similar report on the referred page will be generated.
3. Check My Links
A broken URL checker plugin finds the links on a webpage and scans each link to verify whether it is alive or dead. It highlights broken links when found and serves as a helpful Google extension for web developers, and content editors.
4. SortSite
SortSite is a premium website analysis tool that scans a whole website for quality issues such as broken links, browser compatibility, search engine issues, accessibility, spelling errors, web standards, etc.
5. Sitechecker.pro
Site checker pro website crawler checks website for broken links and provides information about how to correct them. It is easy to research the anchors of 404 error pages to fix them immediately. Being a web tool, it runs in any operating system and crawls website on any CMS.
It can scan 100 web pages for free and give a comprehensive report on broken links, orphan links, redirect chains and indexation errors.
This provides an SEO audit of the exact page and the whole website. It will reflect content errors such as Meta tags or thin pages. But the flipside is only 100 pages are free. Also, no data export is allowed for free subscribers.
6. W3C Link Checker
W3C Link Checker offers ample choices in terms of checking broken links’ summary, redirects, heading documents, etc.
In the results, it delivers links and lists issues through checking broken links. It is free.
7. Online Broken Link Checker
Online Broken Link is a free online website validator tool that checks web pages for broken links, authorizes, detects and documents bad hyperlinks.
It scans an unlimited number of web pages and works for both external and internal links. It runs on Windows, iOS, Linux, and Mac OS.
8. Dead Link Checker
Dead Link Checker crawls a website and detects dead links that disturb websites. It creates HTML output and a link cache file to speed up multiple requirements.
Dead Link checker can highlight broken links like Page not found, Timeout, Server error and other errors that block a webpage’s appearance.
9. Link Check .com
Dr. Link Checker inspects all links internal and external links to another website. It checks links to images, style sheets, and other files. It also scans all HTML and CSS code records and scans the whole website.
Each link originated by Dr. Link Checker passes through several checks to confirm no threats exist that may harm a website.
10. Xenu’s Link Sleuth
This free tool checks broken links of a website. Being easy and user-friendly, it can be used by merely pasting website URL and starts working right away.
Broken link confirmation is also ensured on images, Java applets, borders, plug-ins, style sheets, scripts. It is good for temporary network glitches. But note that it is not compatible with Windows 32 system.
11. Integrity Link Checker
This gives numerous choices to sort the results and check corrupted links in choosing the option on the report page. There are avenues for transferring the data, verification, handling multiple sites, sitemap generation and spelling checks in two connected apps i.e. Integrity Plus and Scrutiny.
12. Google Webmaster
Google Webmaster is a free tool that maintains a website’s performance in search results and authenticates Google to access the content from a website.
It optimizes a website by keyword; offers information that is appropriate for advertising campaigns. It improves links by campaigns with systematic data on external and internal links to web pages.
But the challenge is a link removal requires writing to Google.
13. WP Broken Link Status Checker
WP Plugin for Broken Link Check is a WordPress broken link checker tool that authenticates HTTP status response codes of all content links and images.
It crawls content, removes links and images, observing broken links, offers redirections, no follow links, etc. It scans websites and tries multiple checks and configures own results.
14. Ahrefs Broken Link Checker
Ahrefs Link Checker offers detailed reporting on backlinks to show the links are alive or falling. But it is expensive for small start-ups and not free for the users.
15. A popular case study on broken links
Meanwhile, Ben Jackson, founder of SEO Discovery offers a case study of a broken link building campaign.
According to him, the advantage of broken link building is that pages you recreate can help tons of people linked to it in the past link to you now.
After the broken link building campaign, current links can be multiplied by sharing in social media, social news sites, and other outreach plans to get in-content authority links.
In his SEO contract with clients, he used Xenu link sleuth for finding site-wide broken link checker. Xenu’s report for each site fixed broken links leading to 404 pages.
