Link Audit

"That link goes nowhere"

A reader emails to say the link in an old article goes to a 404. A supplier moves their website and every product page is still pointing at the old one. An editor pasted a link three years ago and the page it went to is long gone. Craft stores the link you give it. It doesn't go back later to see whether the address still answers.

Link Audit does. It reads the links out of your stored content, checks each unique address once, and lists every entry, field and site carrying the broken ones. Each broken link has an Edit link that opens the entry scrolled to the field holding it, and a panel on the edit screen lists that page's broken links, so an editor can fix them where they work. On a site with thousands of them, the Overview suggests where to start, beginning with the few addresses whose one fix clears the most places.

Where to fix it

A report you can believe

Most link checkers go page by page: load a page, check its links, move on. On a site of any size that means asking the same supplier about the same footer link thousands of times in one run, until they block you. Then everything they host shows as broken and nobody trusts the report again.

Link Audit keeps one record for each unique address and notes every place it appears, so the footer link on 3,000 pages is checked once. It keeps its requests down to a couple at a time per host, and backs off when a host asks for room.

It also knows a broken link from a site that won't talk to robots. LinkedIn, Cloudflare and their kind refuse automated requests however healthy the link is, so those go on their own Unverifiable list and never count as broken. A link that doesn't answer at all is only called broken after it has failed several times in a row, because a server that's down for an afternoon usually comes back. Every address sits on one of eight verdicts rather than two, so the Broken list only holds links that really are broken.

Free, and what it doesn't do

It's free, under the MIT licence.

It reads stored field values, not rendered pages, so it sees links on entries with no public URL and can tell you which field each one came from. Links hard-coded into templates aren't in your content, so they're only found by the optional crawl of rendered pages, which is off by default because fetching every page is slow.

Safe to point at your content

Every URL it checks came from something somebody typed into a field, so it's careful about where it sends requests.

A guard refuses any address on a private or reserved network, and checks again on every redirect hop
Usernames and passwords pasted into a link are stripped off before it's stored
Three permissions: viewing reports, running scans, and ignoring or restoring links
Reports only show the sites a user can edit, and a page they can't view appears without its title or field
TLS certificates are verified, and the checker identifies itself so a host can allow-list it

What's in it

Feature	What it does
One check per address	However many entries use it
Where it's used	Every entry, field and site an address appears in
Eight verdicts	Working, Redirect, Broken, No Answer, Unverifiable, Ignored, Not safe to request, and Not checked yet
Rechecks	Working links trusted for 30 days and broken ones rechecked the next day, so after the first scan only stale links are revisited
Internal links	Checked against your own elements and routes rather than over HTTP, so a Retour redirect counts as a redirect
Entry panel	A panel on the entry edit screen listing that page's broken links
Ignores	Park the links you've decided not to chase, and bring them back later
Excluded fields	Leave out fields full of links nobody will fix, like a legacy body kept after a migration
Alerts	Email or Slack when new broken links turn up
Console commands	Full scans, incremental scans on a cron, single rechecks and CSV exports
CSV download	Whatever list you're looking at, filters and all, a row per place

What it reads

Rich text (CKEditor and Redactor), including links inside nested entries
Native Link fields and URL fields
Hyper fields
Matrix and content blocks, however deeply nested
Commerce variants, along with their product
Navigation nodes, if you have verbb/navigation installed
Image and iframe sources in rich text, if you turn them on

It needs Craft CMS 5.6 and PHP 8.2 or later.

Accessibility

What's been checked, and anything that still needs work, is in the accessibility statement.