Scan for Broken Links on a Website with JavaScript

Building a website isn’t a difficult task in a lot of circumstances, but maintaining a website is a totally different story. When it comes to larger scale websites or blogs such as The Polyglot Developer, content can become out of date at any time, and it’s more likely to happen the longer the content appears on the site.

Stale content and content that doesn’t work, whether that be through links, formatting, or something else, can severely damage how you rank in search results and the overall growth of your website.

Let’s dig a little deeper into links for example.

You’re probably going to have links on your website, whether they be internal or external in terms of where they route to. As your website evolves, or as the external websites evolve, those links might change and break. Broken links create a poor experience, something that Google and other search engines take into consideration when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO).

In this tutorial, we’re going to use simple JavaScript to find all of the broken links on an entire website, not just the current page.