Check your website links using Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a free multi-threaded spidering engine for the PC that can check your website for broken links.

Link verification is carried out against hyperlinks, images, plug-ins, backgrounds, style sheets and scripts. Xenu will change the color of links found working as green, or alternatively if there is a problem traversing the link it will change it to red. The program displays a constantly updated list of URLs that you can sort by different criteria. A full HTML report can be produced.

It is extremely easy to get started: Download and install Xenu and then click on “File” -> “Check URL”. A pop-up window appears where you can enter the URL that you wish to test.

Xenu is quite fast because the spider is looking for a number of threads simultaneously and this number can be customised in the settings.

You can also decide the type of output you would like. For example, you could choose to display “Broken links, ordered by page” and “Redirected URLs” but there are many other options.

You can output the results as an HTML web page which is very useful as you can click on the hyperlinks to test and see if they have been fixed or remain problems.