13+ Best Tools to Check and Fix 404 Errors (2024)

Discover the best free online tools for checking 404 errors on websites, with a detailed comparison to help improve your site's performance.
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Key Takeaways

404 errors are links or hyperlinks that refer to external web pages that no longer exist on websites.

When you click on these hyperlinks, an error message is displayed.

Erreur 404
Error 404

404 errors reduce the performance and visitors of any website.

According to the different web browsers, a 404 error can be displayed in various ways, such as:

  • 404 Not Found
  • HTTP 404
  • HTTP 404 Not Found
  • 404 File or Directory Not Found
  • The requested URL was not found in this server

404 errors can be fixed using the tools we've talked about in this article. By using these tools, your site will receive more visitors and its ranking in Google will also improve. 404 errors can be fixed without losing any information on websites.

According to some sources, big companies like Apple, IBM, Microsoft also have several broken links on their websites. The statistics below show the approximate percentage of large businesses.

These approximate big business statistics are taken from the above URL and show the approximate value of 404 errors after our research.

In this article, we are going to talk about SEO tools and software that help SEO specialists and users discover and remove 404 errors on their websites.

They are the most used tools and some of them are also free.

List of the best 404 error checking tools

The most commonly used dead link checking tools on the market are listed below.

1. SE Ranking.

SE Ranking

Developing a link building strategy requires a lot of data. Getting this data can be as easy as putting the domain name in a field and clicking the check button.

SE Ranking offers that and much more. With one click, you get information about the trust of domains and pages, exclusive settings created by the provider. Over time, you'll see all of the referring domains and backlinks from those domains, whether new or lost.

On the dashboard, you can also view data about your backlink profile's dofollow/nofollow report, anchor information, and the locations of the IPs and subnets you're receiving links from.

Features

  • Proprietary domain and trust in pages
  • New and lost backlinks and reference domains.
  • DoFollow/NoFollow report available
  • Anchor and source data (text or image)
  • Alexa ranking is available
  • The location by IPs and subnets is visualized.
READ MORE: SE Ranking detailed review and opinion

Disadvantages

  • API only available with the most expensive plan.
URL: SE Ranking

2. SEMrush.

SEMrush - Broken link

Semrush is a great tool for checking the backlinks of a website that shows all the links pointing to your domain. It provides the features that allow you to know everything about your backlinks and those of your competitors.

Semrush helps verify a website by running a deep link study by inspecting inbound links and anchor texts, and by understanding external links from linking websites. It also offers geodistribution assets such as charts, camemberts, and a world map.

Features

  • Semrush can do a thorough link analysis.
  • It has functionalities to check the type of return link that will allow you to know the source of your competitors' do follow links, the relevant web sources in the sector and the websites that want to refer to your content.
  • It provides geographic distribution widgets such as graphs and pie charts to find answers.
  • It has functions that will allow you to see the unique IP address of the reference domains, the distribution of IP addresses by country, etc.
READ MORE: Detailed SEMrush Review and Review

Disadvantages

  • It is expensive compared to others.
URL: SEMrush

3. Sitechecker.

Sitechecker

The Sitechecker crawler checks your website for broken links and provides all the information on how to fix them. You can look for anchors for 404 error pages and fix them right away.

It is a web tool, so it can be run by any operating system. Additionally, the website on any CMS can be crawled.

Features

  • It analyzes 300 web pages for free.
  • It provides a comprehensive report on the technical health of the website: broken links, redirect chains, orphan links, and indexing errors.
  • It provides an SEO audit of the exact page (free option) and of the entire website (monthly/annual subscription).
  • It shows content errors: meta tag problems, pages that are too small.
  • It creates a visual structure of the website thanks to internal and external links.
  • It sets up site monitoring after the crawling: you can be alerted to corrections made to the site (paid option).
  • It offers a service for tracking backlinks and verifying keyword rankings. (paid option)
READ MORE: SiteChecker PRO Detailed Review and Review

Disadvantages

  • You cannot export data from a free subscription.
URL: Sitechecker PRO

4. Ahrefs Broken Link Checker.

Ahrefs Broken Link Checking

The Ahrefs Link Checker tool provides a detailed report on all the backlinks on your site.

It can understand how your site's links increase or decrease. It is backed by the largest database of living backlinks and AhrefsBot's high crawling speed. It is a good tool to find out information about broken backlinks across the network in one place.

Features

  • Note the backlinks to your competitor's content pages that have been moved.
  • Discover broken external links on related websites through link export.
  • Filter and categorize backlinks.
  • View the full picture of do-follow and no-follow links for any URL.
READ MORE: Ahrefs Detailed Review and Advice

Disadvantages

  • Unable to export graphics from pages.
  • Comprehensive SEO results do not exist.
  • Expensive for small start-ups.
  • Not free for users.
URL: Ahrefs Link Checker

5. Screaming Frog SEO.

screaming frog

Screaming Frog SEO Spider allows you to quickly explore and evaluate your website.

It can be used to explore websites, whether small or large. It allows exploration data to be visualized, studied, and filtered as it is collected.

SEO Spider allows you to transfer things like the URL, page title, meta explanation, captions, etc. to Excel so you can simply use it as a basis for SEO references.

Features

  • Examine backlinks, the internal and external links of websites to improve the performance of your site.
  • Custom searches and extractions are available to discover a certain choice of text.
  • It generates XML sitemaps.
  • The Robots.txt support allows you to check and show the complete performance of the site.

Disadvantages

  • The speed is slow if the websites are very large.
  • Need training to use all resources
  • The free version can only analyze 500 pages.
URL: Screaming Frog SEO Spider

6. Google Webmasters.

Google Webmaster Tool

Google Webmaster is a freely available tool that helps maintain the performance of your website in search results. It verifies that Google can access the content on your website.

Google Webmaster makes it possible to create new pages and articles for Google to explore and to eliminate content that you don't want search engine managers to learn about. Google Webmaster can preserve your website without understanding its presence in search results.

Features

  • It helps you optimize your website by referencing keywords by knowing which sites are the most popular.
  • Access information that will be appropriate for advertising campaigns.
  • Find better insights into the indexing and crawling actions performed by the search engine procedure on your website.
  • Improve your links by campaigns thanks to systematic data on the external and internal links of your web pages.

Disadvantages

  • Anomalies in the updating of data.
  • To remove a link from Google, simply make a request to Google.
  • Rank tracking is affected if your website lands in the first four or five pages of results.
URL: Google Webmaster

7. W3C Link Checker.

W3C Link Checker

W3C Link Checker offers you choices when inspecting your websites for 404 errors, such as showing only the summary, hiding redirections, checking only documents, titles, and more.

In the results, it provides the status of the link and lists the problems found when checking for these broken links. This free broken link checker is part of the Quality Web Tool and the W3C validators.

Features

  • It inspects for issues in links, anchors, and referenced items across the website.
  • A restriction may be established on the depth of the tool.
  • This tool can also be downloaded and installed on your system.
  • It uses HTML and CSS to get the best scan results.

Disadvantages

  • This tool is a bit slow.
  • Error messages are taking longer than expected
URL: W3C Link Checker

8. Dead Link Checker

dead link

Dead Link Checker scans your website systematically and detects any dead links that are disrupting your site.

It can create HTML output for informal inspection of results and can develop a link cache file to speed up multiple requirements. Dead Link Checker can notice 404 errors like Page not found, Timeout, Server error, and any other error that causes the web page not to appear.

Features

  • The dead link has three processing methods, namely site control, multiple check, and automatic check.
  • It filters the URL keyword with wildcards.
  • It can pause and resume at any time.
  • It scans multiple links simultaneously.

Disadvantages

  • Limiting the scanning of pages.
  • The modification of the subdomains is considered a modified website and the links on these domains will therefore not be checked.
URL: Dead Link Checker

9. Dr. Link Check.com.

dr.link

Dr. Link Checker inspects all links that contain internal and external links to another website. It can also check links to images, style sheets, and other files.

It inspects all HTML and CSS code records and scans your entire website. Each link created by Dr. Link Checker goes through several checks to confirm that there are no threats left that could harm your websites.

Features

  • It scans a website to find 1000 links for free.
  • It provides summary reports on internal, external, and broken links.
  • Multiple scans per link.
  • You can schedule checks to run automatically according to your needs.

Disadvantages

  • Limited pages can only be scanned.
  • Not completely free.
  • Even for the basic plan, only 2000 limited links can be scanned per month.
URL: Drlinkcheck.com

10. Xenu's Link Sleuth

xenu

It is a free open source tool for checking a broken link on a website.

It automatically establishes a link to your website and starts to explore the site. It is user-friendly and very easy. For crawling, paste your website URL and it will start checking for 404 errors. Links are confirmed on images, borders, plug-ins, backgrounds, style sheets, scripts, and Java applets.

You can create a report at any time.

Features

  • It is beneficial for temporary network failures.
  • It can run files that are less than 1MB in size.
  • It takes care of SSL websites and the sitemap.
  • Limited testing of FTP, gopher, and mail URLs.

Disadvantages

  • Not compatible with Windows 32.
  • Does not have the graphics capabilities of WebAnalayzer 2.0.
  • Gopher site analysis methods are not reliable.
URL: Xenu's Link Sleuth

11. Integrity Checker.

Integrity Broken Link Checker

Integrity Checker is a free desktop application for Mac.

Depending on the scope of your website, this tool may take some time to complete the report. It has numerous choices for sorting the results, and it can only check for corrupt links, by choosing the option on the report page.

It also makes it possible to inject 404 errors from feedback forms. Options such as data transfer, verification, multiple site management, sitemap generation, spell checking are all available in two connected applications, namely Integrity Plus and Scrutiny.

Features

  • Works great with big websites, without any slowness.
  • It also checks for broken images.
  • Check internal and external links.
  • It exports reports in.pdf format

Disadvantages

  • It is intended for Mac users only.
  • It takes time to complete the report after inspecting the 404 errors.
  • To use Integrity Plus Checker, it is not available for free to users.
URL: Integrity Checker

12. WP Broken Link Status Checker.

WP Plugin for Broken Link Check

It's a WordPress 404 error checking tool that authenticates the HTTP status response codes of all your content links and images.

It works by crawling your content, removing links and images, watching for 404 errors, redirects, unfollowed links, etc. It analyzes websites by performing several checks and configuring its own results.

Features

  • It runs the crawler in the background without any sessions.
  • It has advanced filters and searches by URL or anchor script.
  • Allows you to edit content directly from crawler reports without having to paste into the post editor.
  • It has additional tools to make significant changes if similar message URLs are present.

Disadvantages

  • Does not check the complete HTML page, but only extracts links and images.
  • You should deactivate the firewall before using this plugin.
  • You must deactivate the WP Secure plugin to perform a complete scan appropriately.
URL: WP Broken Link Status Checker

Conclusion.

In this article, we have discussed the best 404 error checking tools available on the market.

The tools described above are the most popular, and their features and prices can be addressed based on industry needs.

Dead link checking tools are the fastest, easiest to install, and most free for users. You can choose any tool according to your needs.

Based on our research, Xenu's Link Sleuth is the best choice for Windows users, while SE Ranking, SEMrush and Screaming Frog SEO Spider comes after.

For Mac users, Integrity Tool is the best choice for all types of industries.

RECOMMENDED READING: The Best URL Shorteners for Custom Links
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