Triquetra Design

Posts Tagged ‘free link checker’

Xenu’s Link Sleuth™ has been around for quite a while and I first came across it when Windows 2000™ was flavor of the day. I was still hand coding back then so didn’t have any software available for searching out bad links. I found this free link checker and have been using it ever since.

It’s not a huge program and certainly doesn’t have many frills, but it works. Really well. Although my current authoring software (Dreamweaver CS4™) does have a link checker it is very basic and doesn’t like stuff like javascript called ads, so with a website of around 2000 pages I get a lot of allegedly broken links. Link sleuth does not suffer from this flaw and correctly indicates broken/not broken. In addition you can specify folders or whatever to be ignored. I don’t know if there is a limit on the number of pages that can be checked – I have certainly tested it on websites with over 2000 pages and it has performed flawlessly. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

The generated report can be easily viewed as html which you can also have e-mailed to wherever should you so desire. One of the features I particularly like is the easy rechecking of broken links. If you do get one in your report you can make the necessary correction and recheck it without having to run the entire report again.

No, it’s not fancy but it works and it’s free. Link Sleuth works on all versions of Windows™ back as far as Windows95™ and has also been tested on Windows 7™.

This free link checker can be downloaded from here.