General 4 min read

How to check a website for broken links for free

A one-off list needs a free crawl with no account. Ongoing alerts need a baseline, so you hear only when a working link newly breaks. Both have free plans.

There are two different jobs hiding behind "check my site for broken links", and the free tool you want depends on which one you have. A one-off list of what is broken today is a crawl. An alert when a link that used to work stops working is a baseline plus a repeat crawl. Litework has a free plan for each, and neither needs a card.

Job one: a list, today

You have a site you have not audited in a while, a client handoff, or a cleanup afternoon. You want every dead link on a sample of pages, now, and you do not want to create an account to see it.

Paste the URL into SiteCheck. The free inspection crawls up to 25 pages, with no account and no card, and reports broken links next to HTTP errors, redirect chains and loops, missing or duplicate titles and descriptions, H1 problems, robots.txt, sitemap, TLS, mixed content, noindex, and canonicals. Twenty-five pages is a real sample on a small site. A template bug shows up on the first page that uses the template.

Read the broken-link section first. Internal links are yours to fix at the source: the menu, the template, or the body copy. External links are a choice: replace, remove, or leave.

Paid plans raise the page limit and repeat the scan. Starter is $9/month or $90/year for one site, 100 pages, weekly scans, and email reports. Pro is $19/month or $190/year for five sites, 500 pages each, daily scans, and email alerts. Agency is $49/month or $490/year for 25 sites, client-ready reports, and CSV. How to run the scan and triage the result is in how to inspect a website for health problems.

Job two: an alert when a link newly breaks

You already know the old 404s. Some of them you are leaving on purpose. What you want is to hear when a link that worked last week stops working, and nothing else.

That is a different shape of tool. A plain crawler has no memory, so every run reports the same twenty historical dead links and the one new one is buried among them. The fix is a baseline. Why checkers keep repeating themselves is in why broken-link checkers keep reporting the same broken links.

Mortise works this way. You verify a site you own. The first crawl is silent and stores which links work. Later crawls alert only after a previously working link fails twice as 404 or 410. Free: 1 verified site, 200 pages per crawl, one manual crawl every 24 hours, results on the dashboard, no card. Pro is $12/month or $79/year: 10 sites, 2,000 pages, a daily or weekly schedule, email and a webhook for new breaks only, and CSV.

The free plan is manual. You press the button once a day. That is enough for a site that changes weekly. A site that ships content daily wants the schedule on Pro.

Which one, this afternoon

  • You want a list and you do not want to sign up: SiteCheck's free scan.
  • You want the list and other defects too (redirects, TLS, SEO basics): SiteCheck's free scan.
  • You have cleaned the site and only want regressions: Mortise's free plan.
  • The site is one you did not build and cannot verify: SiteCheck. Mortise crawls only sites you prove you own.
  • You do both for the same site: inspect first, fix, then baseline. The pairing is in website inspection vs new-break alerts.

What free does not do

  • Neither free plan sends email. SiteCheck's free scan is a report on screen. Mortise Free is dashboard only. Email and webhooks are on the paid plans.
  • The page limits are real: 25 pages for a SiteCheck scan, 200 for a Mortise crawl. A large site needs a paid plan for the fuller picture, but the free sample still tells you whether there is a mess.
  • Neither tool watches the words on a page. A page can be rewritten and every link still returns 200. Text changes, downtime on a URL, and certificate expiry are SignalWatch, which also has a free plan with no card.

Checklist

  • You can say whether you need a list or an alert.
  • One-off list: SiteCheck free scan, no account, fix internal links at the source.
  • Ongoing alert: Mortise free plan, baseline after cleanup, crawl again the next day.
  • Old known 404s left quiet on purpose, not re-reported every week.
  • Larger site: paid plan on whichever tool matched the job.