Check My Links verifies all links on a web page

One of the things that you need to take care of as a webmaster is to make sure that links are working properly on your site.

Broken links cause bad user experience among other things. Say you have reviewed a software program and the link pointing to it is broken.

Reasons for that can be manifold. Maybe you have made an error pasting it into the article, or maybe the site the program was hosted on moved or was deleted by its author.

Regardless of why the link is broken, users who click on it will be disappointed because of that as it is not leading to the expected result.

While some will just search for the program on the Internet, the opinion of others about the site may drop, especially if this happens frequently.

One option to deal with links on your site is to use automation. WordPress webmasters for instance can use the Broken Link Checker plugin for that.

Another the excellent Xenu's Link Sleuth which is a portable Windows program that scans links starting with a single url or multiple urls that you add to it.

Check My Links offers another option. The extension for Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers can run link checks on any website you open in the web browser.

 

To use it, you simply click on the link the extension adds to the address bar of the web browser. Once done, you will notice that it scans all links on the site, internal and external, and color codes them to provide you with direct information about their status.

Links highlighted in green are working as intended, while red ones are not. When it comes to red links, the error code that was returned is also displayed so that you know if a resource was not found on the linked server or if it is a mere redirect or another issue.

Check My Links displays a status widget on the page as well highlighting the number of links, links left in queue for checking, and the number of good and broken links.

You can exclude domains from being checked. This can be useful if you do not want internal links checked, as you can add the root domain of your website to the list so that it is bypassed automatically. The same can be done for social media links, advertisement links and other links that may be displayed on every page on a website but that you do not really want checked.

The downside of Check My Links is that you can only use it manually. It is therefore not really suitable for checking all pages of a website, unless we are talking about ten or so.