Starting a blog throws a lot of things at you that you don’t expect until you’re already running it. But like any business, the important part is just getting started.
Once your blog is up and you’re publishing content regularly, a few technical housekeeping tasks become important, and checking for broken links is one of them.
Free Broken Link Check Tools for Bloggers
Why Broken Links Matter for Bloggers
When you’re writing content, at some point you’ll naturally link out to other sites, whether for a source, a reference, or extra context for your readers.
Here’s the catch: you have no control over what happens to those external pages after you link to them. If the site you linked to takes the page down, moves it, or shuts down entirely, that link on your blog becomes broken.
Visitors clicking it hit a dead end instead of the destination you promised, which tends to increase your bounce rate.
Manually checking every single link across your blog to confirm it still works is tedious and unrealistic once you have more than a handful of posts. This is where a broken link checker tool comes in, scanning your entire site and flagging every dead link automatically.
Broken Links Can Affect Your Monetization Too
Here’s something worth knowing if you’ve ever applied to Google AdSense and gotten a rejection mentioning your site appears to be “under construction”: broken links are frequently the actual cause.
AdSense’s review process relies heavily on automated systems. When these bots encounter broken links across your site, they interpret it as a sign your site isn’t finished being built yet, even if that’s not remotely true.
Fixing broken links, either by redirecting them to working pages or removing them, can directly resolve this specific rejection reason.
How to Check for Broken Links on Your Website
There are several solid, free tools for this. Since tools in this space come and go over time, it’s worth verifying a tool is still active before relying on it, but here are current, reliable options worth trying:
Option 1: Brokenlinkcheck.com
This was historically one of the most straightforward free tools for this task, and remains worth trying first since it requires no signup. Here’s how to use it:
- Go to brokenlinkcheck.com.
- Enter your site’s URL.
- Click “Find Broken Links.”
- Enter the security code exactly as shown. If it’s unclear, generate a new one using the option next to it.
- Check the “All occurrences of each broken link (may be slower)” box, this ensures the scan doesn’t skip any broken links.
- Click “Find broken links now!” and wait for the scan to finish.
Option 2: A WordPress Plugin (If You’re on WordPress)
If your blog runs on WordPress, a dedicated broken link checker plugin (several exist, with some options seeing hundreds of thousands of active installations) can scan your site automatically and alert you whenever a link breaks, without needing to manually run a check each time.
Option 3: Browser Extensions
A number of free browser extensions can scan the page you’re currently viewing for broken links in a single click, useful for quickly checking a specific post rather than your whole site.
Option 4: Larger SEO Tool Suites
If you’re already using a broader SEO tool for other purposes, many include a broken link checking feature as part of a fuller site audit, which can be convenient if you want everything in one dashboard.
How to Read and Fix the Results
Once a scan completes, you’ll typically get a “Completed” status along with a list of any broken links found. If the count comes back at zero, you’re in good shape.
If broken links do turn up, you can usually click on each one to see the specific error it leads to (a 404 “not found,” for instance). From there, you have two options: redirect the link to a relevant working page, or remove it from your post entirely if no suitable replacement exists.
Most tools also let you trace exactly where the broken link sits within your content, including the specific text or phrase it’s attached to, which makes it much faster to locate and fix within your post editor.
If you were previously rejected from Google AdSense due to broken links, once you’ve cleaned everything up, you can resubmit your site for another review.
Why Broken Links Are Bad for Your Blog
The damage broken links cause isn’t always obvious until you actually experience its effects firsthand.
They Hurt User Experience
Visitors come to your blog looking for something specific. A broken link leads them to a dead end instead, which is frustrating and unhelpful. Enough of these bad experiences, and visitors will simply turn to a competitor’s blog instead, taking their attention (and any future visits) with them.
Given how much effort goes into driving traffic to a blog in the first place, losing visitors this way is an avoidable waste.
They Can Cost You Revenue
Unless you’re blogging purely as a hobby, lost visitors directly translate to lost income. If you’re monetizing with display ads, more traffic generally means more earnings, so losing visitors to broken links chips away at that.
The same logic applies to affiliate marketing and selling your own products, more engaged visitors means more chances of converting into paying customers.
Sponsors evaluating your blog for a partnership will also look closely at your traffic levels and overall site quality. Nobody wants to invest in a partnership with a site that doesn’t look reliably maintained.
They Affect SEO
Yes, broken links impact your search rankings. Google rewards sites that consistently deliver value to visitors. A site riddled with dead links signals the opposite, sloppy maintenance and reduced reliability, which Google’s crawlers pick up on during routine site visits.
It’s worth adding some nuance here: Google itself has acknowledged that having a handful of broken links here and there is a completely normal part of running any website and won’t tank your rankings on its own.
The real concern is a pattern of neglect, a site with dozens of unaddressed broken links signals abandonment far more than one or two dead links picked up along the way.
Broken links can also waste part of what’s called your site’s “crawl budget,” the limited number of pages search engines will crawl during a given visit, since crawlers waste effort hitting dead ends instead of discovering or re-indexing your useful content.
Once you start seeing solid SEO results, ongoing maintenance, including periodic broken link checks, helps you protect and build on that progress rather than letting small issues quietly accumulate.
A Simple Maintenance Habit Worth Building
Rather than treating this as a one-time fix, it’s worth running a broken link check periodically, say, once every few months, or whenever you notice an unusual uptick in your bounce rate.
Blogs that link out frequently, especially older, content-heavy sites, tend to accumulate broken links naturally over time as the wider web changes around them. A quick recurring check keeps this from quietly piling up into a bigger problem.
Conclusion
Broken links are one of those small, easy-to-overlook issues that quietly damage user experience, revenue, and SEO all at once. The good news is fixing them is straightforward once you know to look, run a scan, review the results, and redirect or remove what’s broken.
We’ve come to the end of this post on free broken link check tools for bloggers. I hope you found it valuable and helpful. If you need any help or have suggestions or questions, feel free to comment below, I’d be so glad to hear from you.
