Website Link Monitor: Find & Fix Every Broken Link on Your Site

Every website accumulates broken links over time — pages get deleted, external sites go offline, URLs change without redirects. Website Link Monitor crawls your entire domain and classifies every link it finds into one of five status levels. This guide explains how the tool works, what each status means, and how to read your health score.

What makes a link "broken"?

A link is broken when the URL it points to returns an HTTP error — most commonly 404 Not Found (the page was deleted or moved without a redirect) or 410 Gone (explicitly removed). Server errors (5xx) also count as broken because visitors can't reach the destination.

The trickier cases are soft 404s — pages that return a 200 OK status but actually display "page not found" content. These fool simple link checkers into thinking the link is healthy. Website Link Monitor detects soft 404s by inspecting the response body after the status-code check.

The HEAD→GET→retry validation pipeline

Most link checkers send only a HEAD request. The problem: many servers return 403 or 405 for HEAD requests even though the page loads fine in a browser. Link Monitor uses a three-step fallback:

1. HEAD — fast check, sends a real browser User-Agent to avoid bot-blocking
2. GET fallback — if HEAD returns an ambiguous or blocked status, fetch the full page to get the real response
3. Retry — on timeout or transient errors, retry once before declaring the link broken

This pipeline is what cuts false positives by 95% compared to HEAD-only checkers. The result: every link in your scan report is genuinely worth acting on.

Understanding the 5 status levels

Every link in a scan is assigned one of five statuses:

• Healthy — 2xx response. The link resolves correctly. No action needed.
• Broken — 4xx or 5xx response after all retries. Fix or remove this link.
• Redirect — 3xx response. The URL works, but it redirects somewhere else. Update the link to point directly to the destination and save a round-trip.
• Potential — soft 404 or a HEAD/GET mismatch. Worth manually verifying before deciding to fix or ignore.
• Timeout — the server didn't respond within the time window. Could be a temporarily slow server or a genuine outage. Re-scan later to confirm.

Reading your health score

The health score is a simple ratio: healthy links divided by total links, expressed as a percentage. The thresholds:

• 80–100% (green) — healthy. Maintain with periodic rescans.
• 50–79% (yellow) — needs attention. Prioritise fixing broken links first.
• Below 50% (red) — critical. High broken-link ratio will hurt user experience and SEO.

The score updates after each scan. Running a scan, fixing the broken links, and re-scanning is the fastest way to push your score into the green zone. Project history lets you see the trend over multiple scans.

How to run your first scan

1. Go to multi-toolkit.com/link-monitor and click Add Project.
2. Enter a project name (e.g. "My Blog") and your full website URL including protocol (e.g. https://example.com).
3. Click Scan Now. The crawler will discover pages and check every link it finds. Scan time depends on site size — a typical 50-page site takes under two minutes.
4. Open the scan results. Use the status tabs to filter by Broken first, then Redirect, then Potential. Fix or remove each flagged link in your CMS or codebase.
5. Re-scan after fixes to confirm the health score has improved.

How often should you scan?

For most sites, a monthly rescan is sufficient. If you publish frequently or regularly remove/rename pages, weekly scans are better. E-commerce sites with product pages that come and go should scan after every major catalogue update.

External links decay faster than internal ones — third-party pages go offline without warning. A monthly pass over external links specifically is good practice for content-heavy sites that cite a lot of sources.