Sites break in small places. A product is removed, and every guide that linked to it now ends in a 404. A PDF is renamed during a migration. A partner closes their site. An image is still loaded over http on a page that moved to https, and the browser quietly blocks it. None of this takes the site down, so uptime checks stay green. Visitors and search engines notice anyway.
Broken link monitoring is part of the daily site health scan. It walks your site the way a search engine does and checks everything it finds.
How the scan works
- It starts from the page you give and reads the sitemap, found through robots.txt or at /sitemap.xml.
- It follows links within your site, up to the page limit you choose: 50, 100, 250 or 500 pages.
- Every link, image, script, stylesheet, frame and media file it finds is checked once.
- Links to other sites are checked too, only to see that they answer; they are not crawled. You can turn that off.
- It runs once a day, and you can start a scan yourself at any time, for example right after a deploy.
What counts as a problem
- Broken: links and files that answer with an error such as 404 or 500, or do not answer at all because of a DNS error, a refused connection or a timeout.
- Mixed content: images, scripts and other files loaded over http on an https page, which browsers block or warn about.
Answers such as 401, 403 and 429 are not counted as broken, since they usually mean a login or a rate limit, not a missing page.
A typical case
After a site migration, the morning scan of northwind.shop finds two broken links and one mixed content warning. The returns guide links to a PDF that now returns 404, the brands page links to a partner whose domain no longer resolves, and the about page still loads a team photo over http. The alert lists each one with the page it was found on. The fixes take ten minutes; without the scan, the returns guide would have sent customers to a dead end for weeks.
Alerts on new issues only
A site with 400 pages always has something to fix. To keep alerts useful, Uptimecheck compares every scan with the one before and only alerts about new issues. The monitor keeps the full list, so you can work through older problems when you have time. Alerts go to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Google Chat, Mattermost, Telegram, PagerDuty, ntfy, Pushover, webhooks and push notifications on every plan.
Why it matters
Broken links cost twice. Visitors who hit a 404 on the way to a product often leave, and search engines spend their time on pages that do not exist. Mixed content can make a page look broken or insecure. Our website maintenance checklist and what to monitor on your website put link checks in context.
One scan, two answers
The same daily scan measures page speed with Google Lighthouse, so one site health monitor covers broken links, mixed content and Core Web Vitals. It counts as one uptime monitor: 15 on Start, 100 on Professional and 250 on Business. The live demo includes a site health monitor you can open without signing up.
For agencies
After every launch and every content update, something breaks. Add a site health monitor for each client site, group them in projects per client, and fix broken links before the client finds them. See Uptimecheck for agencies.
Plans start at €9 per month billed yearly or €12 billed monthly, excl. VAT. See the pricing page, or start a 14-day free trial without a card.