5 Ways to Find Broken Links on Your Website (With Code Examples)

Broken links hurt your SEO ranking, frustrate users, and make your site look unmaintained. But how do you actually find them? Here are five practical approaches, from simple to automated, with real code you can use today. 1. Manual Browser Extensions Browser extensions like "Check My Links" or "Broken Link Checker" highlight dead links on a single page. Pros: Zero setup, visual feedback Cons: One page at a time, no automation, no CI/CD integration Best for: Quick spot-checks on a single page. 2. Command-Line Tools (wget) wget --spider --recursive --level = 3 \ --no-verbose --output-file = links.log \ https://example.com grep -i "broken" links.log Pros: Already installed on most systems, recursive crawling Cons: Noisy output, no structured data, slow on large sites, hard to parse results Best for: One-off checks on small sites. 3. Python Script (requests + BeautifulSoup) import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoup from urllib.parse import urljoin def check_links ( url ): resp = reques