Broken Link Checker: Site Crawler, 404 & Redirect Audit

Find every broken link, missing image and redirect chain on your website in minutes, with the exact page each one is on, so you can fix 404s before visitors and search engines hit them.

Point it at a website and it opens each page, collects every link and image, checks them all, and tells you which ones are broken and which page they're on. You can also skip the crawl and paste a list of URLs to check.

It's a plain HTTP checker, with no browser, so it's quick and cheap to run, even on a few thousand links.

Why use it

• Fix 404s before your visitors find them. You get the dead URL, the page it's on and the link text, so you know exactly what to edit.
• Clean up after a migration or redesign. Find internal links that still point to old URLs and links that bounce through two or three redirects.
• Catch missing images. <img> and srcset sources are checked too, and you can include scripts and stylesheets.
• Audit outbound links. External sites move or shut down. This finds the domains that no longer resolve.
• Check a list. Paste URLs from a spreadsheet, an export or a sitemap and get the status, redirect chain and final URL for each.
• Monitor on a schedule. Run it weekly and send the results to email, Slack or Google Sheets with Apify integrations.

How it classifies links

result	Meaning	Counted as broken?
ok	2xx response (after any redirects)	no
broken	4xx or 5xx response	yes
error	DNS failure, refused connection, SSL problem, malformed URL	yes
timeout	No answer within the timeout	no (worth a second look)
blocked	401, 403, 429 or 999. The server refused an automated check (common on Etsy, LinkedIn and sites behind bot protection)	no

Many link checkers report blocked links as broken and bury the real problems. This one keeps them separate. Every redirected link also gets redirected: true, the full redirectChain and the finalUrl.

The checker sends a HEAD request first. If the server answers with an error, it confirms with a real GET, because plenty of servers answer HEAD badly. Rate-limited answers (429, 503) get a short pause and up to two retries.

Input

{
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.woodbetweenstudio.com" }],
  "mode": "crawl",
  "maxPages": 200,
  "maxLinks": 5000,
  "checkExternalLinks": true,
  "checkImages": true,
  "onlyProblems": true,
  "excludeUrlPattern": "/cart|/login"
}

Field	What it does	Default
startUrls	Crawl mode: where to start. List mode: the URLs to check	(required)
mode	crawl follows internal links. list checks only what you pasted	crawl
maxPages	Internal pages to open and read links from	200
maxLinks	Maximum unique URLs to check (each one is a billed event)	5000
checkExternalLinks	Check links to other sites (they're checked, never crawled)	true
checkImages	Check <img> and srcset URLs	true
checkScriptsAndStyles	Check <script src> and stylesheets	false
onlyProblems	Output only non-OK links. Turn off to get every link	true
excludeUrlPattern	Regex for URLs to skip completely	empty
respectRobotsTxt	Don't crawl pages that robots.txt disallows	true
concurrency / perHostConcurrency	Parallel requests overall and per server	10 / 2
timeoutSecs	Per-request timeout	20

Output

One row per link, worst problems first. For example:

{
  "url": "https://www.woodbetweenstudio.com/does-not-exist",
  "result": "broken",
  "isBroken": true,
  "statusCode": 404,
  "error": null,
  "redirected": false,
  "redirectCount": 0,
  "finalUrl": null,
  "redirectChain": [],
  "linkType": "internal",
  "element": "a",
  "anchorText": "Holiday printables",
  "nofollow": false,
  "foundOnCount": 2,
  "foundOn": ["https://www.woodbetweenstudio.com/", "https://www.woodbetweenstudio.com/holiday/"],
  "responseTimeMs": 84,
  "contentType": "text/html; charset=utf-8",
  "checkedAt": "2026-10-30T19:35:10.000Z"
}

A redirect looks like this:

{
  "url": "https://httpbin.org/redirect/3",
  "result": "ok",
  "statusCode": 200,
  "redirected": true,
  "redirectCount": 3,
  "finalUrl": "https://httpbin.org/get",
  "redirectChain": ["302 https://httpbin.org/redirect/3", "302 https://httpbin.org/relative-redirect/2", "302 https://httpbin.org/relative-redirect/1"]
}

The key-value store also gets:

• SUMMARY: pages crawled, links checked, counts by result.
• REPORT: a one-page HTML report you can open in a browser or send to a client.

Pricing

In plain words: $0.80 per 1,000 links checked (that's $0.0008 per link), plus Apify's small standard Actor start fee. A typical 50-page site with about 300 unique links costs roughly $0.25.

• You pay once per unique URL. A link that appears on 50 pages is checked and billed once.
• Crawled pages count as checked links, because opening a page also checks it.
• With onlyProblems on, healthy links are hidden from the output but were still checked, so they are still billed.
• Cap your spend with maxLinks or a maximum cost per run. The Actor stops at the cap and still saves everything it checked.

FAQ

Can I use it on a site I don't own? Checking whether public links work is ordinary web hygiene. Even so, the Actor respects robots.txt for crawling, never crawls external sites, and keeps per-server load low (2 parallel requests by default). Point it at your own sites or your clients' sites, and follow each site's terms.

Why do Etsy, LinkedIn or Instagram links show as "blocked"? Those sites refuse automated requests whatever the page status, so the Actor can't tell whether the link works. It marks them blocked instead of guessing. Spot-check them in a browser.

Does it run JavaScript? No. It reads the HTML the server sends, which covers most sites, including WordPress, Shopify storefronts, Squarespace, Wix and static sites. Links that only appear after JavaScript runs won't be found.

Does it check links inside PDFs? No. PDFs that are linked from pages get their own status checked, but the Actor doesn't open them to look for links.

What about #anchor links? The fragment is removed and the page itself is checked. The Actor doesn't verify that the anchor exists on the page.

How long does a run take? A 50-page site with about 300 links takes roughly 15 seconds. A 25-page site with 2,700 links takes about 3 minutes, mostly spent waiting on slow external servers.

Related tools

These work well together for a quick technical SEO check:

• SEO Meta Tag Audit: bulk-check meta titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, H1s and schema, with a 0-100 score per page.
• Sitemap & RSS Feed Exporter: export a sitemap.xml or RSS feed to CSV, Excel or JSON.

Typical workflow: export the sitemap first, then run this Actor in list mode on exactly the pages you care about.

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Made by Wood Between Studio.