QA Series: Checking for broken links

Part of our QA Testing Series

Broken links are more than just user experience killers—they hurt your SEO rankings, damage credibility, and can cost you conversions. But manually checking every link on your website? That's time-consuming and error-prone.

The Smart Way: Automated Link Crawling

Instead of clicking through your site manually, modern QA teams use automated crawlers that systematically discover and validate every link on your website. Here's how it works:

Intelligent Site Crawling

• Starts from your homepage and follows every internal link
• Discovers pages organically, just like search engines do
• Validates both internal navigation and external references
• Checks for redirect chains, anchor links, and 404 errors

Real-Time Link Health Monitoring

• Detects broken internal links that hurt navigation
• Validates external links that may have changed or disappeared
• Identifies redirect chains that slow down page loads
• Finds missing anchor links within pages

Schedule It and Forget It

The best part? You can schedule these checks to run automatically:

• Weekly site-wide scans to catch issues before users do
• Pre-deployment validation as part of your CI/CD pipeline
• Post-update verification after content changes
• Continuous monitoring for high-traffic sites

Get Notified When Things Break

When broken links are detected, you'll know immediately through:

• Email alerts sent to your development team
• Slack notifications in your QA channel
• Zapier integrations to connect with your existing workflow tools
• Dashboard reports with detailed breakdowns by page and severity

This means your team can fix issues proactively instead of waiting for user complaints or discovering problems during routine maintenance.

Example Output

LoadForge automatically reports on any errors as an overall error percentage, but the script below also outputs debug logs:

==================================================
[from worker loadforge-684fb41c6e3f80_be2761979e4f408392f5e9849e9023c9] INTERNAL LINKS CHECK COMPLETE
[from worker loadforge-684fb41c6e3f80_be2761979e4f408392f5e9849e9023c9] ==================================================
[from worker loadforge-684fb41c6e3f80_be2761979e4f408392f5e9849e9023c9] Pages crawled: 51
[from worker loadforge-684fb41c6e3f80_be2761979e4f408392f5e9849e9023c9] Total links checked: 2020
[from worker loadforge-684fb41c6e3f80_be2761979e4f408392f5e9849e9023c9] Broken links found: 0
[from worker loadforge-684fb41c6e3f80_be2761979e4f408392f5e9849e9023c9] ✅ No broken links found!
[from worker loadforge-684fb41c6e3f80_be2761979e4f408392f5e9849e9023c9] 

Ready to Start?

Setting up automated broken link detection is straightforward. We've created a comprehensive LoadForge script that handles everything from crawling to reporting.

Get the complete broken link checker script →

The script includes:

• Intelligent crawling that respects rate limits
• Detailed error classification and severity levels
• Comprehensive reporting with actionable insights
• Easy integration with your existing monitoring stack

Don't let broken links damage your website's reputation. Automate the detection, schedule regular checks, and keep your site healthy without the manual work.