Review of free broken link checkers

So how do you find missing links on your site without laboriously going through them all and checking them by hand?

Obviously, you need an automated tool. There are loads out there that can do this but you don't really want to pay for a massive tool that does a whole bunch of stuff that you really don't understand most of what it's telling you right? What you want is a simple tool that does this one job, has easy-to-understand results and is free.

You probably also don't want to sign up to a regular subscription for a tool that you may only use occasionally. Looking for the term 'Broken link checker' in a Google search, results in most of the top page entries showing up as subscription services. For a normal client of mine, this is complete overkill.

Hence this review of some online tools that do this job.

1) Dr. Link Check https://www.drlinkcheck.com/

I like this one because:

1. It runs on my phone and is responsive to fit on my phone and this means I can check my links wherever I am and have some spare time without having to plug into my laptop.
2. The results page is easy to understand
3. It is free to use for up to 1500 links and requires no sign-up to use it.
4. Its quick to run.
5. It found a broken link on my website that my usual paid-for tool called Website Auditor failed to notify me about.

2) Broken Link Check https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/

Why I like this less than Dr. Link Check:

Broken Link Checker sort of works on a mobile but the design of it is non-responsive so you have to scroll to the right to be able to see the box where you enter your URL.

It didn't find the broken link reported from Dr. Link Check!

3) Dead Link Checker https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/

This looks like it may well work for some people but it didn't work for me as it was blocked by my robots.txt file entries with a 'denied access' message. This may be a good thing as it is at least checking the robots.txt file to see if is allowed to run on my site, whereas options 1) and 2) above worked fine. 

Because it wasn't allowed to run on this site you are looking at now I switched sites to my wedding videography site and my magician site and ran both. My initial reaction was to see it running painfully slowly compared to the previous two sites above. 

If you have loads of time to leave this running in the background, maybe then this could work for you but I got bored watching the checks tick by at a snail's pace and cancelled both runs.

I then noticed the Auto Check option and the Multi Check option, both of which allow you to set up the check to run in the background and then send the report to you automatically by email. To do this of course you need to set up a paid-for subscription service!