Full Guide on How to Check Your Website for Broken Links by Tools Glide
As the owner of a website, you know how important it is to give your users a smooth experience. What happens when someone clicks on a link and is taken to a 404 page? In this case, a broken link checker is very important. Users will be annoyed by broken links, and they will also hurt your SEO.
In this full guide by Tools-Glide, we'll show you how to find broken links, why they're important, and how to fix them.
What Is a Broken Link Checker and Why Do You Need One?
When you run a broken link checker on your website, it detect broken links, also called “dead links,” that lead to web pages that don’t exist or can’t be reached. These could be:
- Internal links, which take people to your own site
- External links, which take people to other sites
People can remove pages, change URLs, or domains can expire—leaving these broken links behind.
A link checker tool can help you find broken links on websites before people or Google do. Running a website link checker on a regular basis can:
- Help you keep your SEO authority
- Keep your site's image from taking a hit
How It Works:
- The tool looks through your whole site like a search engine would
- It checks each anchor tag, link, picture link, and script
- It tells you about URLs that give you 404 problems or timeouts
- It’s easy and quick to check all of a website’s links with tools like the one ToolsGlide offers
Why You Should Regularly Check Links on Your Website
You can't just make a website and forget about it. As your content grows, so does the chance of getting dead or broken links. Here's why it's important to regular checks links:
- Maintain User Experience: People who visit your site and find dead links may leave and never come back
- Protect Your Reputation: The quality and clarity of your links show professionalism
- Support Your SEO: Google judges the health of your site by how many live, working links it has
- Increase Conversions: Functional links take people to product pages, forms, and CTAs
Whether you run a blog, e-commerce site, or business page, a website link checker is essential for maintaining a trustworthy online presence.
Tips to Prevent Broken Links in the Future
Broken links can happen even on the best websites. Here’s how to reduce the chances:
- Use Descriptive URLs: Don’t change URLs for no reason; it can cause internal links to break
- Smart Redirects: Use 301 redirects for moved or deleted pages
- Check External Links Regularly: Especially those pointing to outside sources
- Use Link Checker Plugins: If you're on WordPress, install plugins that notify you when a link breaks
- Regularly Update Content: Older blog posts or product pages often contain outdated links
Good link checkers, like Tools Glide, make it easy to simplify this process and stay on top of link issues.
Broken Links Can Hurt SEO and User Experience
Ignoring broken links can affect both your search engine rankings and user satisfaction.
Bounce Rate and Broken Links
Your bounce rate is one of the first things that broken links can impact. If users click on a link expecting something useful and instead hit a 404 error:
- They’re likely to leave immediately
- High bounce rates signal to search engines that your site delivers a poor experience
- Lower user trust means lower ranking
Example:
If someone lands on your e-commerce site and clicks a product link that no longer exists, they will likely exit right away—and may never return.
Using a good broken link checker helps find and fix these errors before they affect your stats.
What Search Engines Do When They Find Dead Links
Search engines like Google use web bots to crawl your pages. Too many dead links can cause:
- Less efficient crawling: Bots waste time on dead pages
- Lower trust: Google sees broken links as signs of poor upkeep
- Ranking drops: Especially for competitive keywords
Use a website link checker regularly to keep your site optimized and trustworthy.
Bonus: Use Spider Simulator to See What Crawlers Look At
Want to know how a search engine views your site? Use Tools-Glide’s Spider Simulator tool. It behaves like a search engine crawling and indexing your site, helping you understand:
- How bots understand your internal link structure
- Which links work and which don’t
- Whether your important pages are easily discoverable
A broken link checker and Spider Simulator work best together to give a full view of your site’s health and SEO visibility.
Final Thoughts
These days, the internet moves very quickly, and no one has time for broken links—not your users, not Google, and not you.
Tools like ToolsGlide’s Broken Link Checker make it simple to:
- Find dead URLs
- Check websites for broken links
- Fix problems before they become serious
Don’t wait for rankings to fall or bounce rates to climb. Use a link checker tool now to keep your website clean, professional, and user-friendly.
When used with our Spider Simulator, you get a full picture of how well your site is performing.
Are you ready to check out your site?
Use the Broken Link Checker in Tools Glide right now to make sure your online profile is error-free!