Its very important to ensure that all the pages you have linked in your site are reachable. But its impossible to manually crawl each page and check the status of the links and update accordingly.
In this post I’m listing down 3 types of broken link checkers and its features, a portable one, as a wordpress plugin and an online app. Read this article, choose your link checker and do mention in the comments.
1. Portable Tool – Xenu’s Link Sleuth
Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a free tool which can be used to verify the status of the links in your site. This tool is a must have for any web master/blogger who uses a good amount of external/internal links in their sites.
This tool generates a neat report in html format and gives all the information regarding the link status. It also gives us a quick summary at the end of the report
Report Summary
Features
- Simple user-interface
- Can re-check broken links (useful for temporary network errors)
- Simple report format
- Executable file smaller than 1MB
- Supports SSL websites (“https:// “)
- Partial testing of ftp and gopher sites
- Detects and reports redirected URLs
- Site Map
Check the Wiki article on Link Sleuth here
Download Link Sleuth : 
(More Info @ Xenu Link Sleuth Homepage)
2. WordPress Plugin – Broken Link Checker
This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.
Broken Link Checker WP Plugin
Features
- Monitors links in your posts, pages, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
- Detects links that don’t work and missing images.
- Notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found.
- Also detects redirected links.
- Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
- Link checking intervals can be configured.
- New/modified posts are checked ASAP.
- You view broken links, redirects, and a complete list of links used on your site, in the Tools -> Broken Links tab.
- Each link can be edited or unlinked directly via the plugin’s page, without manually editing each post.
Install Broken Links Checker :
3. Online Version – iWebTools Broken Link Checker
This is the simplest and online version of the previously mentioned broken link checker. Just submit the URL you want to check for and the broken links are represented by the ‘cross’ mark. The links are checked in the background and displayed through Ajax so we dont have to wait and refresh the page for each check. Go to iWebTools
Broken Link Checker Online
Check iWebTools Broken Link Checker
