Find broken links before your visitors do

SiteCurl follows every link on your pages and checks if it works. Links that return a 404, 500, or any error get flagged. The check covers anchor tags, image sources, stylesheet references, and script sources.

It visits up to 10 links per page with a 4-second timeout each. For every broken link, SiteCurl shows the source page, the broken URL, and the HTTP status code. You know exactly what is broken and where to find it.

On a full scan of 100 pages, this can cover hundreds of internal links. The results are grouped by page, so you can work through fixes one page at a time.

Broken links rarely break all at once. They build up slowly. Someone deletes a blog post but forgets the sidebar link. A developer renames a URL slug during a redesign but misses an internal reference. A CMS plugin updates its URL structure and leaves old links behind. Each one is small. But after a year of routine edits, a 50-page site can easily have a dozen dead links.

The worst part is that broken links are invisible to site owners. You do not see a 404 unless you click that exact link. Visitors hit them when they click a call-to-action, follow a related post, or navigate from an older page. The experience is jarring: they expected content and got an error. Many leave and do not come back.

Search engine crawlers follow these links too. When Googlebot hits a 404, it records that your site returned an error. A few are fine. But a pattern of broken links signals that the site is not maintained, which can affect how often Google crawls your other pages.

Broken links tell visitors your site is not kept up. They also waste crawl budget. Each time a search engine follows a dead link, that is one fewer page it could index. Over time, broken links drag down your site quality score in search results.

On agency client sites, broken links are one of the top issues after a redesign or content move. Pages get moved, URLs change, and old links stop working. A regular scan catches these before a client or prospect notices.

There is also a trust cost. A visitor who hits a 404 on your site is less likely to fill out a form or make a purchase. If the first link they click is broken, they question whether the rest of the site works. That lost trust is hard to measure.

E-commerce sites lose sales when product links break. If a category page links to a product that was removed or renamed, that click goes nowhere. Multiply that across dozens of products and the revenue loss adds up.

Agencies managing client sites face a different problem. Clients notice broken links and question the agency's attention to detail. A monthly scan is cheap insurance against that call.

Content-heavy sites like blogs and media outlets are the most vulnerable. Every time a post is edited, moved, or deleted, related links on other pages can break. The more content you have, the more links you need to maintain.

For each broken link, you have three choices: fix the URL, point the link somewhere else, or remove it. Start with the page that has the most broken links and work down.

Step 1: Check if the page moved. If the target URL was renamed or restructured, update the link to point to the new URL. Search your CMS for the old slug to find all references at once.

Step 2: Set up redirects for deleted pages. If a page was removed but had inbound links, add a 301 redirect from the old URL to the closest relevant page. This preserves any search value the old URL had.

Step 3: Remove links with no replacement. If the content is gone and there is no good alternative, remove the link entirely. A removed link is better than a broken one.

Step 4: Check your CMS. In WordPress, plugins like Redirection or Yoast handle 301s. In Shopify, go to Settings > Navigation > URL Redirects. For static sites, add redirect rules in your server config or hosting dashboard.

After fixing, run another scan to confirm the links work. SiteCurl tracks your score over time so you can see the gains.

Fixing the link but not the redirect. If you update a link on one page, other pages may still point to the old URL. Set up a redirect to cover all references, not just the one you found.

Using relative URLs inconsistently. Mixing relative and absolute URLs makes broken links harder to track. Pick one format and use it across your site. Absolute URLs are easier to audit because they show the full path.

Ignoring image sources. Broken images do not show a 404 page, but they leave a blank space or broken icon on your page. SiteCurl checks image sources alongside regular links, so treat broken images with the same urgency.

Fixing links one at a time instead of in bulk. If a URL slug changed, search your entire codebase or CMS for the old slug. Fixing one reference and missing three others means you will see the same issue on the next scan.

After making fixes, run another SiteCurl scan on the same pages. The broken link count should drop. If a link still shows as broken, check that the target URL returns a 200 status. You can confirm this in your browser by opening the URL directly, or use curl: curl -I https://yoursite.com/page and look for HTTP 200.

For redirects, check that the old URL returns a 301 (not a 302). A 301 tells search engines the move is permanent. A 302 means temporary, and search engines may keep the old URL indexed.