How to Find & Fix Broken Links on a Website

Why dead links cost you, how to find every one, and how to fix them fast.

Links rot. Pages move, sites shut down, URLs get renamed — and over time any website accumulates links that point to nowhere. Broken links quietly hurt you in two ways: they frustrate visitors (a dead end kills trust), and they waste crawl budget while signaling neglect to search engines. The good news: they're easy to find and fix once you look.

What counts as a "broken" link

404 / 410 — the page is gone.
5xx — the destination server is erroring.
Timeouts & connection errors — the domain is dead or unreachable.
Soft 404s — returns 200 but the content is a "not found" page (harder to detect automatically).

How to find them

For a single page, you can inspect each link by hand — but that doesn't scale past a few. The reliable method is to extract every outbound <a href> on the page and request each one's HTTP status, flagging anything 4xx/5xx or unreachable. Do that across your key pages on a schedule and link rot never builds up.

Scan any page's links in one call

Our Broken Link Checker pulls every outbound link on a page, checks each one's status, and returns the full list of broken URLs with their codes — no API key, pay per page, callable via Apify MCP.

Run the Link Checker →

How to fix what you find

Update the URL if the destination simply moved.
Swap or remove links to sites that are permanently gone.
301-redirect your own broken internal URLs to the closest live equivalent.
Re-check after fixing to confirm everything resolves.

Pair link-checking with a full on-page SEO audit and you've covered the two highest-ROI, lowest-effort technical SEO wins on any page.