13+ Best Tools to Check and Fix 404 Errors (2026)

Key Takeaways

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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.

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.