Today we are going to focus on tools that help you reveal dead links on your website. We have created a large set of tests that cover ways to link a resource in HTML4, HTML5, and CSS3. Using these tests we were able to evaluate many free broken link checker tools. Sadly, we found out that few tools are really usable. So, which tool is the best link checker?
Selecting Link Checkers for the Test
Which tools did we test? Here are the criteria that we used to select tools for our testing:
- We went through the first 40 results returned by Google for search query broken link checker.
- We required the tool to be able to check links on remote websites.
- The checker had to be free to use even if some limitations applied. If there were limitations, however, they had to allow using the tool reasonably.
- The checker had to be able to check pages recursively, which means that it was not necessary to manually run the tool for every page you want to check, but the tool was able to crawl the whole website automatically. This feature is crucial for any link checker that is intended to be used seriously.