But there is one simple website audit that is often overlooked: checking for broken or dead links.
Broken links are links on a website that no longer lead to a valid webpage. They can occur when a page is deleted, a URL is changed, a website is moved, or an external resource becomes unavailable. For users, broken links create a frustrating experience. For website owners and SEO professionals, they can also make maintaining a healthy website considerably more difficult.
The Problem With Most Free Dead Link Checkers
There are many excellent website auditing and broken-link-checking tools available today. However, most free versions come with limitations.
Some tools restrict the number of pages you can crawl. Others limit the number of links that can be checked or allow you to scan only a certain number of levels deep into a website. Once you reach the limit, you need to upgrade to a paid plan.
This can be particularly frustrating for SEO agencies and developers working on large websites.
A website with hundreds or thousands of pages needs a crawler that can properly explore the website rather than stopping after a small number of pages.
Just as importantly, the final report needs to be simple, understandable and actionable. Finding hundreds of broken links is useful only if you can easily identify where those links are located and what needs to be fixed.
So We Built Our Own Free Website Auditor
At DotsandComs, we work with websites every day, so we decided to build the tool we wanted to use ourselves.
We created Free Website Auditor, a completely free online tool designed to crawl a website and identify dead and broken links.
The biggest difference is simple:
There are no artificial scanning limits.
You can scan unlimited pages, unlimited links and unlimited recursive depth, allowing the crawler to explore large websites instead of stopping at arbitrary limits. The tool also requires no signup and no registration.
The crawler provides real-time crawl information and includes features such as intelligent request handling, retry mechanisms and optional robots.txt awareness.
Try the Free Website Audit Tool
Whether you are an SEO professional, web designer, developer, business owner or simply want to check the health of your website, a broken-link audit is a useful part of regular website maintenance.
And the best part is that you don't need to pay for it.
Try our Free Website Auditor here:
Free Website Auditor – Scan Your Website for Broken Links
No signup. No page limits. No link limits. No subscription.
Just enter your website URL and start scanning.
A healthier website starts with finding the problems you don't know about.