Broken Link Detection
Automatically crawl your clients' sites and find 404s, dead links, and broken references — before their visitors do.
How it works
SiteBrief starts a headless crawler at the site's root URL and follows links throughout the site. Every internal link is fetched, and the HTTP response code is recorded. External links are also checked. Any link that returns a 4xx or 5xx status code — or fails to load — is flagged as broken.
The results show the broken URL, the HTTP status code, and the page where the link was found — so you know exactly where to fix it.
What gets flagged
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 404 Not Found | Page or resource no longer exists at this URL |
| 410 Gone | Resource intentionally removed — no redirect |
| 500 Server Error | Internal server error when fetching the linked URL |
| 403 Forbidden | URL exists but access is denied (usually a permissions issue) |
| Timeout | Link didn't respond within 30 seconds |
| DNS failure | The linked domain doesn't resolve — domain may be expired or typo |
| Connection refused | Server is not accepting connections on that port |
Crawler behavior
- Start URL: the site's configured URL (root of the site)
- Scope: crawls all pages reachable from the homepage
- Internal links: followed and crawled recursively
- External links: checked for HTTP status but not crawled further
- Images, CSS, JS: checked if referenced in HTML (src, href attributes)
- Crawl speed: rate-limited to avoid overloading the server
How to run a broken links check
Broken link scanning must be enabled in the site's settings (toggle "Broken links check" on). Once enabled, go to the site detail page and the Broken Linkspanel will appear. Click "Scan now" to start a crawl.
After the scan completes, the panel shows:
- Total number of broken links found
- Date and time of the last scan
- A list of each broken URL with status code and referring page
Common scenarios
Client migrated from HTTP to HTTPS and has internal links to http://
This is extremely common. Run the broken links scan — all http:// internal links will show as redirects (not broken) if HTTPS redirects are in place. But if any are hardcoded to http://and redirects aren't set up for those specific paths, they'll 404.
Client deleted a product or page without setting up a redirect
The broken links scan will find all pages that still link to the deleted URL. Share the list with the client and set up 301 redirects from old URLs to the closest current equivalent.
Third-party resources (fonts, JS libraries) from dead CDN
If a client is loading a library from a CDN that went offline or changed URLs, the scan will flag it. Update the site to use a current CDN URL or self-host the resource.
Using results in client communication
A broken links report is a concrete, tangible deliverable that demonstrates the value of your monitoring. Instead of saying "we monitor your site", you can say: "We found 7 broken links on your site last week — here's the list, and we've already fixed 4 of them."