LinkChecker

LinkChecker is a Windows program designed to verify the validity of links from a particular website. It integrates intuitive options that can be configured by all user categories.

The installation procedure takes little time to finish, and no special attention is necessary. As far as the interface goes, LinkChecker opts for a simple window that shows all main options.

You can get started by pasting the URL whose containing links you want to check. Indexing the website may take a while, depending on its complexity.

A list gets populated with any links with errors, showing their name and parent URL. Meanwhile, the upper part of the screen reveals all active URLs, along with queued and checked items.

Clicking an entry from the list shows detailed information on the problematic link, such as check time, size, date of modification, warning, and result.

Additional options become available in the right-click menu, where you can open a link in the default browser or copy data to the Clipboard. It is possible to specify the scan recursive depth, set up warnings when particular strings are identified, as well as create a list of patterns to ignore in URLs.

Once the scanning is completed or stopped, check results indicate total valid and invalid URLs, warnings, content type statistics (e.g. total images and text files), and URL stats (minimum, average and maximum length).

The program may take a long time to finish a scan job, during which it uses pretty high CPU and RAM. However, we have not come across any unpleasant surprises during our tests, since the tool did not hang, crash or pop up error messages. It serves its purpose.

There is also a portable edition available (called LinkChecker Portable) for those who want to run the utility from a mass storage device without modifying Windows settings.