How to Find Broken Links on a Website

Seven practical ways to find dead links — from Chrome DevTools to a full-site crawl — and how to verify false positives before you rewrite URLs.

You do not need a $300 crawler to find dead links. You need a method that matches the size of the mess.

1. Click like a user (tiny sites)

For a five-page brochure this is honest. It does not scale, and you will skip the footer on page four.

2. Browser DevTools

Network tab, disable cache, reload, filter by red / 4xx. Good for one layout, blind to the next URL.

3. Google Search Console

Index → Pages (or Legacy crawl errors, depending on the UI week). This is Google’s crawl, not yours. It misses JS-only links, staging, and anything Google has not fetched lately. Still the first place to look for “is this already a ranking problem?” More in GSC 404s.

4. A Chrome extension on the live page

Open the page you are editing. Scan every a[href], see status, highlight the node, export CSV. That is what Advanced Broken Links Search is for. False positives still happen (WAF, geo, HEAD vs GET) — switch method in settings and recheck one URL before you delete a campaign.

5. Whole-site crawl in the same browser

Follow internal links, read sitemap.xml, keep history. Details: whole-site scan and how to crawl a site. This is the gap between “the hero is fine” and “the 2019 blog still points at /shop/old.”

6. Desktop crawlers

Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, etc. Right tool for 50k URLs and mixed SEO extracts. Wrong tool for “the client’s staging link in Slack.” We wrote the Chrome vs Frog page without pretending they are the same sport.

7. Platform plugins

WordPress plugins that cron your own site: convenient, often noisy, sometimes a security story. A WordPress-specific pass is still worth doing after you know which templates are dirty. Same idea for 1C-Bitrix, Tilda, Shopify, Wix, Yandex KIT, hoster builders, and custom stacks: scan the rendered HTML, not only the admin.

Verify before you “fix”

Recheck 5xx tomorrow.
Open the final URL after redirects.
Confirm the 404 is not a geo block from your IP.
Decide restore / 301 / drop — do not 302 a funeral.

If you want one pass on the page in front of you, install the extension and start. If you want the rest of the domain, turn on crawl. That is the whole workflow.