If you have a website and link to things regularly, there’s nothing more annoying than when your links eventually expire. I find this most annoying when linking to YouTube videos which eventually get taken offline. Usually, the only solution to this is to laboriously go through every link yourself checking it works but when you’re talking about a huge website, this is terribly time consuming if not to say, impractical. Fortunately, there are several programs out there that can do the job for you in a jiffy – they can’t fix the links but they’ll tell you in a few seconds exactly which links are working. Here is my top 5.
- Link Viewer – Maps your website links and shows which ones are broken
- Web Link Validator – Also displays orphaned files and slow linking pages
- Xenu’s Link Sleuth – Supports SSL sites and some FTP links
- HTML Link Validator – Colour coded results according to link status
- Fast Link Checker – Uses search engine technology to verify links quickly