Link Inspector: Find every broken link on your website

Every website suffers from the same slow leak: links that worked when an article was published quietly break over time. So I’ve built a tool to catch them, called Link Inspector, and I would love your feedback on it.

It sits alongside the other free KT8 Tools (the speed test, mail tester and DNS checker) at kt8.com/tools/link-checker. Like the others, it’s in private preview for now. You can see where it fits on the Projects page.

Why links break

Nobody breaks a link on purpose. It just happens naturally:

• Site redesigns: a company updates its website and old addresses stop working.
• Removed content: a product, offer or article is taken down.
• Lapsed domains: a domain expires and is bought by someone else.
• Internal changes: you rename a page on your own site but forget an old article still points to it.

When readers hit a dead link, they often assume the entire post is out of date. Search engines notice, too. On a site with hundreds of posts, checking every link by hand is simply not realistic.

How it works

You enter your web address and click Check links. Link Inspector reads your home page, picks out every link, and follows them across your site, up to 500 pages. Links to other websites are checked once to make sure they still load, but it never crawls other people’s sites.

To keep things fast and light, it fetches plain page content rather than loading a full web browser. It also crawls politely: it respects your site’s robots.txt file, checks only three addresses at a time and pauses between batches, so your site never slows down. Big sites can take a few minutes, and the check keeps going if you close the page.

What the report shows

• Broken links and pictures: pages that no longer exist, server errors, lapsed domains, timeouts, security certificate problems and missing pictures. Each result shows the page where the link was found and the exact link text used.
• Redirects: links that still work but go through one or more redirects first, which are worth updating before they break completely.
• Insecure links: http:// links found on an https:// website.
• Clear advice: plain-English steps to fix each problem, with no status codes to decipher, and a copy button on each one.
• Keep a copy: download the report as a spreadsheet, or share a link to it with whoever looks after your website. Reports are kept for 30 days.

What’s next

Weekly checks are on the way, emailing you only when a link breaks, along with one list for checking all your clients’ websites.

I’m also thinking about nightly checks in ReaderCount, my cookie-free website stats. It already knows which pages people visit and which outbound links they click, so it could test those links every night and alert you the morning after one breaks, with no full site crawl needed. That puts the links your readers actually use first. A dead link on your most popular article is worth fixing immediately; one on a post nobody has visited in years can wait.

What do you think?

If you manage a website or blog, I would love to know:

1. Is there any key information missing from the report?
2. Would you prefer a weekly email, the ReaderCount nightly checks on active links, or both?

Leave a comment below or get in touch. If you’d like to try it during the preview, ask and I’ll add you.

Disclosure: KT8 Tools and ReaderCount are my own personal projects, and there are no affiliate links in this post.