Broken links checker tool description
This is a description of what is broken link (dead link) and how to check for it using our tools. What is this article about:
- What is a broken link (dead link)?
- Why broken links are bad for a website?
- How to use "UpTime.onl" Broken link checker tool
What is a broken link (dead link)?
Your website may contain additional resources. Like images or scripts. Some of them are essential for your website's working.
But sometimes when visitors open your page these resources might not be loaded. Especially, when you store some resources on the different storage as your website.
For that resources, you will get response code 404 or other error HTTP code. It shows that a resource is not available. The reasons might be different.
That non-working links are called broken. Because the browser can't load it.
Why broken links are bad for a website?
Having a broken link means your website not working as expected. It might lead to visitor retention. Broken links might damage your website's ranking, usability, user experience. It might affect your positions in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. It might be annoying for your visitors.
If the visitor can't see the image because of a broken link he/she might leave your website.
Let's imagine the situation when you host stylesheets in the CDN. And CDN suddenly stopped working. We recreated such a situation so you can see the example of the UpTime.onl landing page without any stylesheet loaded) below.
Looks bad, isn't it? So it is obvious that it is better to check all resources are loaded.
But manually it might be very hard to check it. You have to open every page and check the rendered page or the browser developer tools if there any resource loading errors.
That's why we created our automatic broken link checker tool. You don't have to do it manually.
How to use our Broken link checker tool
The tool is available only in the Professional plan. Using it very simple. Just add the URL of the page you want to check. And check will start automatically. We will do a basic URL uptime check and in the Professional plan, we also will check the domain expiration date, SSL certificate expiration, etc. It is very simple.
The tool will check your website for broken links every hour. 24 hours a day, every day. So you don't have to check it manually.
Whenever you have a broken link to an image or script or stylesheets or any resource needed to render the page correctly, we will immediately send you a notification. The tool doesn't check (for now) any "<a>" tags. Only current page resources.
Here is an example of the broken link error in the Dashboard
