Link checking is one of the few areas of SEO where a genuinely good tool is available at no cost. That raises an obvious question: if a free broken link checker can crawl your site and list every dead link, why would anyone pay? The honest answer is that most small sites never need to, and some sites benefit enormously from the features that paid plans add. Knowing which group you are in saves you money in one direction and saves your site in the other.
This article breaks down what free checkers typically include, what paid tiers add, how to tell which one your site needs, and how to get the most out of a free plan if that is where you land.
What a free broken link checker usually includes
The free tier of a modern web-based checker is not a crippled demo. It is a working crawler with real limits. A representative free plan looks like this:
- A page cap per scan, commonly in the low hundreds. Broken Link Checker, for example, scans up to 250 pages per crawl free.
- A daily or monthly scan limit, such as two scans a day without an account or 50 scans a month with a free account.
- Full status-code detection: 404, 410, 5xx, redirects and redirect chains.
- Soft 404 detection based on page content, not just status codes.
- SSL checks for expired or misconfigured certificates.
- Sitemap-first crawling so orphan pages are found.
- External link checking as an option.
- Exclusion patterns and query-parameter collapsing to keep the crawl focused.
- Live streaming results and a shareable report URL for each scan.
Some features sit behind a free account rather than a paid plan. Checking images, scripts, stylesheets and documents is a common example. Creating a free account takes a minute and requires no card, so this is not a real barrier.
Put together, that is enough to run a complete audit of most small business sites, portfolios, local service sites and blogs with fewer than a few hundred pages. If that describes your site, you may never need more.
What paid plans add
Paid tiers generally do not improve the quality of the crawl. The free crawler finds the same broken links the paid one does. What you pay for is scale, automation and convenience.
Higher page and scan limits. Sites with thousands of pages need a higher page cap to be crawled fully. Agencies managing many client sites need more scans per month. Paid plans lift both, up to unlimited scans on higher tiers.
Scheduled re-scans. This is the single most valuable paid feature. Links rot continuously; Pew Research found that about 8 percent of pages only a year old were already dead. A free plan requires you to remember to scan. A paid plan scans daily or weekly on its own.
Email alerts. Paired with scheduling, alerts mean new broken links reach your inbox within a day of appearing, rather than being discovered months later by a customer.
Multiple websites under one account. Free plans are usually per-scan. Paid plans let you register several sites, each with its own schedule and history. Tiers commonly run from one site, to five, to hundreds for agencies.
AI-assisted link fixes. Newer tools use AI to suggest a replacement URL for each broken link, which speeds up the fixing step considerably on large sites.
Pro platform integrations. A Pro WordPress plugin, for instance, may add scheduled scans and in-editor fixing beyond what the free plugin offers.
Bundled SEO tools. Some checkers are part of a suite. Paying for the checker may also give you rank tracking with a quota of keywords, an internal link optimizer, an SEO audit, an AI visibility monitor and uptime monitoring. If you would pay for those separately, the bundle changes the value calculation.
How much paid plans cost
Pricing in this category is modest compared with full SEO platforms. As a reference point, Broken Link Checker’s paid tiers are $49 a year for one website with 200 scans a month, $99 a year for five websites with unlimited scans and the Pro WordPress plugin, and $299 a year for 250 websites, unlimited scans and 1,000 rank-tracked keywords. Monthly billing starts at $5.95. Those figures are typical of the category: cheap enough that a single prevented lost sale or a single recovered backlink pays for a year.
Which one does your site need?
Work through these questions honestly.
How many pages do you have? Under 250, and a free plan can crawl everything in one scan. Over 250, you either need a paid plan or you need to crawl in sections, which is workable but tedious.
How often does your content change? If you publish weekly or more, or link out heavily, dead links accumulate fast and scheduled scanning earns its cost. If you update a few times a year, a manual monthly scan on a free plan is fine.
How many sites do you manage? One site, free is fine. Several client sites, a paid plan with multi-site support and per-site history quickly pays for itself in saved time.
What does a broken link cost you? On a hobby blog, a dead link is a minor annoyance. On an ecommerce site, a 404 on a product page that still ranks is lost revenue every day it stays broken. The higher the cost of a single broken link, the stronger the case for automated monitoring.
Will you actually remember to scan? This is the honest one. If your track record says you will set a reminder and ignore it, scheduled scans are worth paying for on that basis alone.
Getting the most out of a free plan
If you decide free is enough, a few habits make it work well.
Create the free account. It usually unlocks asset checking and a higher monthly scan limit, at no cost.
Regenerate your sitemap first. The crawler finds orphan pages through the sitemap. An outdated sitemap means missed pages.
Use exclusions aggressively. With a page cap, every wasted request on a tag archive or pagination page is a real page not crawled. Exclude /tag/, /page/, /feed/ and similar patterns, and turn on query-parameter collapsing.
Crawl in sections if you exceed the cap. Scan /blog/ one day, /products/ the next. It is more work than a paid plan but it gets full coverage.
Put the scan on your calendar. Monthly for most sites. The tool will not remind you on a free plan, so your calendar has to.
Use the browser extension for spot checks. A free Chrome extension can scan the page in your current tab and highlight broken links in place. It is ideal for checking a new post before publishing without spending a full-site scan.
Use the free WordPress plugin. If you are on WordPress, the free plugin brings the report into wp-admin and lets you fix links from the report itself, which removes most of the tedium of the fixing step.
When free stops being enough
There is a clear tipping point. You will know you have hit it when one of these happens:
- You find yourself crawling in sections every month because the page cap is too low.
- A customer or client reports a broken link that your last scan, three months ago, could not have caught.
- You manage more sites than you can keep track of manually.
- A 404 on a high-traffic page went unnoticed long enough to cost real money.
At that point, the cheapest paid tier is almost always cheaper than the problem it prevents.
A note on old-school desktop checkers
Some free link checkers are desktop programs that have existed for well over a decade. They still work, and for a one-off crawl of a huge site they can be useful. But they have real drawbacks: they need installing and updating, they tie the crawl to one machine, they rarely detect soft 404s or check SSL, they produce reports you have to export manually, and they cannot schedule anything. For most site owners, a modern web-based free tier is both easier and more capable.
A practical starting point
The sensible approach is to start free and upgrade only when you hit a limit. Broken Link Checker makes that easy. The free scan covers 250 pages with no account and nothing to install, allows two scans a day, streams results live, finds 404s, faulty redirects, soft 404s and SSL problems, and gives every scan a shareable report. A free account raises the limit to 50 scans a month and unlocks image, script and document checking. If you later need scheduled monitoring, email alerts, multiple sites or the Pro WordPress plugin, the paid tiers start at $49 a year, and the same account includes a wider set of SEO tools such as rank tracking, an internal link optimizer, an SEO and AEO audit and an uptime monitor.
Whichever tier you choose, the important thing is to run the first scan. Most sites that have never been checked are carrying dozens of dead links, and every one of them is a visitor lost and a ranking signal wasted. Free or paid, fixing them is one of the fastest wins available.
