Broken Link Checker

A broken link checker scans your URLs and tells you which ones no longer work. It catches link rot after it happens — dynamic short links prevent it from happening in the first place.

---

Definition

A broken link checker is a tool or process that scans a list of URLs to identify which ones no longer resolve to a working destination. It works by sending an HTTP request to every link in the scope being checked — a website, a document, a sitemap, a list of published articles — and recording the response code returned by each one.

• 200 OK — the link works, the destination loaded successfully
• 404 Not Found — the destination page no longer exists at that address
• 410 Gone — the destination was deliberately and permanently removed
• 301 / 302 redirect — the link works but now forwards to a different address; not broken, but worth knowing about
• Timeout / connection failure — the server did not respond at all, often indicating a domain that has expired or a site that is offline

A broken link checker's output is a report listing every URL that failed, the specific error encountered, and usually the page or document where the broken link was found — giving the site owner a prioritised list of fixes.

Why Broken Links Happen

A link that worked perfectly when first published can stop working at any point afterward, for reasons entirely outside the original publisher's control:

This accumulation of dead links over time, across the web as a whole, is known as link rot — broken link checkers are the standard tool for measuring and managing it within a specific site or content set.

Why Broken Links Matter

• User experience and trust. A visitor who clicks a link and lands on a 404 page loses confidence in the source — whether that source is a website, an email newsletter, or a printed flyer with a QR Code.
• SEO impact. Search engines crawl and follow links as part of how they assess and index content; a page riddled with broken outbound links can be treated as a lower-quality signal, and broken internal links waste crawl budget and disrupt the flow of authority across a site.
• Lost conversions. Every broken link in a marketing campaign, an old social media post still generating clicks, or a printed reference is a lost opportunity — a visitor who was interested enough to click but reached a dead end instead of the intended destination.

Detection vs Prevention: Two Different Strategies

A broken link checker is fundamentally a detection tool: it tells you, after the fact, which links have already stopped working. By the time a checker flags a dead link, every visitor who clicked that link since it broke has already hit a dead end — the checker did not prevent that experience, it only made the publisher aware of it.

Dynamic short links take a fundamentally different, preventative approach. Instead of publishing a website's raw, final destination URL directly — in an email, a printed flyer, a QR Code, a social media bio, or a press release — a publisher uses a short link whose underlying destination is stored centrally and can be updated at any time, independently of the link text itself.

The two approaches are complementary rather than competing: a broken link checker remains useful for auditing raw, un-shortened links on a website's own pages, while dynamic short links remove the broken-link risk entirely for any link distributed externally — in channels the publisher cannot retroactively edit once published.

How Cuttly Prevents Link Rot at the Source

Every short link created in Cuttly stores its destination URL separately from the short link itself. This means the destination can be edited at any time from the Cuttly dashboard — without changing the short link text that has already been printed, shared, or embedded in a QR Code — and the change takes effect immediately for every future click on that link, regardless of how long ago or in how many places the link was originally distributed.

This is particularly valuable for:

• Printed materials. A QR Code on a product, a poster, or a business card cannot be edited once printed — but the dynamic short link it encodes can be redirected anywhere, indefinitely.
• Historical content. Old blog posts, press releases, and social media posts referencing a short link continue to work correctly even after the underlying website has been completely rebuilt.
• Platform migrations. When switching e-commerce platforms, booking systems, or CMS providers, only the destination behind each short link needs updating — not every individual reference to that link across every channel where it was ever shared.

Related Terms

• Link Rot
• Redirect 301 / 302 / 307 / 308
• Link Management
• Dynamic QR Codes
• Canonical URL