It is super easy to miss broken links on your website. Even if you test it rigorously, it can be difficult to catch them all. That is where an automated crawler can come in useful. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is one such tool.
It only runs on Windows, so I had to run it in a VM. It is also rather a blunt instrument – it crawls everything even though you can be pretty certain that if you have checked one article ID page, they are all going to work. But those few points aside, it is very useful.
It rapidly spiders all of your pages and reports back on both broken links and redirects. It checks CSS, JavaScript and images resources too, and you have the option to check external URLs as well so you get full coverage. It then spits out a HTML report. It is amazing how many little links you find that need fixing when you run it. Well worth spending a bit of time on.
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Tags: web design, Websites
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2015 at 11:35 am and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.