# Broken page & mixed content detection Broken links kill your SEO rankings and send customers to dead ends. Google penalizes sites with broken links, browsers block mixed content, and every 404 page makes your site look abandoned. We crawl your entire site daily, checking every page just like Google does. When we find broken links, 404 errors, slow pages, or mixed content that browsers will block, you'll know within hours - not when Google drops your rankings or customers complain. [ Start monitoring ](https://ohdear.app/register) 10 day free trial No credit card required ## Broken links damage more than you think SEO penalties, lost customers, and support headaches Google's algorithm treats broken links as a signal of an abandoned or low-quality site. Too many 404s can drop your search rankings across your entire domain - not just the broken pages. Customers who hit broken links bounce immediately. They don't fill out your contact form, don't complete checkout, don't read your content. They leave, often to a competitor's site that actually works. Support teams waste time fielding "Why can't I find..." tickets. Every broken link generates confused emails, lost sales, and frustrated customers who expect basic functionality to work. Our crawler checks your entire site daily, catching broken links within hours of appearing - whether they're from CMS URL changes, hasty Friday deploys, external sites that moved, or restructured navigation. How links might get broken URLs accidentally get changed in the CMS Dev team hastily shipped an update on Friday URLs to external pages change over time No proper redirects set up for changed URLs ## Browsers will block mixed content and break your site One HTTP image can disable all your JavaScript Mixed content happens when your HTTPS page loads HTTP resources - images, scripts, stylesheets, or fonts. Browsers don't just warn about this anymore. Modern browsers actively block mixed content, breaking your site's functionality immediately. The damage is instant and severe: JavaScript stops executing, CSS fails to load, images don't render, forms don't submit. Your site goes from working to completely broken the moment a browser blocks mixed content. Customers see a broken page, not a warning they can ignore. This typically happens after: migrating to HTTPS but missing hardcoded HTTP URLs in templates, third-party widgets loading insecure resources, CMS content with old HTTP image URLs, or CDN configurations that serve mixed protocols. We crawl your site daily and flag every HTTP resource loaded on HTTPS pages. Fix them before browsers break your site for customers. ## Stop manually checking every page Automated crawling beats all alternatives Most teams check for broken links by: clicking through pages manually (impossible for sites with hundreds of pages), running Screaming Frog occasionally (requires remembering to do it), waiting for Google Search Console reports (days delayed), or hoping customers report issues. Manual checking doesn't scale. A 100-page site has thousands of potential links. A 1,000-page site is impossible to check manually. By the time you notice broken links, Google's already crawled them and adjusted your rankings. Free tools like Screaming Frog work, but only when someone remembers to run them. They catch issues after deploys - not continuously. Google Search Console reports broken links days or weeks after discovery. Our crawler runs automatically every day, checking every page and every link. You'll know about broken links within hours of them appearing, not days later when SEO damage is done. ## Choose how we let you know when our crawler finds broken links or mixed content Receive our notifications on your preferred platform. Via email, SMS, Slack, Discord, Opsgenie, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, Pushover, ntfy, webhooks,… we can notify you wherever your team is active. Take notifications to the next level: only notify who needs notifying by assigning responsibilities to different team members. ## Delegate fixes efficiently with detailed reports Export complete data developers need Finding broken links is only half the battle. Fixing them requires knowing: which pages have broken links, what URLs they're pointing to, what error codes they're returning, and which issues matter most. Export a complete CSV/Excel report with every detail: source page URL, broken destination URL, HTTP status code (404, 500, timeout), and when we discovered it. Developers get everything they need without asking for clarification. Prioritize fixes intelligently. Broken links on your homepage matter more than ones buried 10 clicks deep. Links returning 404s are easier fixes than 500 errors. The report shows you which issues to tackle first. Hand the report to your development team, external contractors, or hosting provider. No back-and-forth, no missing context - just a complete list of exactly what needs fixing. ## Protect your agency reputation at scale Monitor all client sites without manual work Agencies face a unique challenge: you launch sites, hand them over, and hope nothing breaks. Meanwhile, clients update content in the CMS, install plugins, change URLs, and break things - often without telling you until customers complain. Broken links on a client's site damage your agency's reputation, not just theirs. When their customers hit 404 pages on a site you built, they blame both of you. When broken checkout links lose sales, clients question the quality of your work. Manual monitoring doesn't scale past a handful of sites. Checking 10 client sites weekly is already unsustainable. Checking 50 sites is impossible. You need automated monitoring that works while you focus on new projects. Monitor all your client sites from one dashboard. Get instant alerts when any site develops broken links or mixed content. Fix issues proactively before clients notice. Prove ongoing site health with exportable reports. Scale your operations without scaling manual checking. ## What our crawler checks (and what it doesn't) Understanding crawler limitations Our crawler excels at finding broken links, missing pages, and mixed content on publicly accessible pages. It crawls your site like Google does, following links and checking HTTP responses - catching issues that hurt SEO and user experience. What it checks: HTTP status codes (404, 500, timeout), broken internal and external links, mixed content (HTTP on HTTPS pages), slow-loading pages (over 5 seconds), and redirect chains. What it doesn't check: pages behind login forms ([AI-powered monitoring can test authenticated flows](https://ohdear.app/features/ai-monitoring)), JavaScript-heavy single-page apps that require execution, content dynamically loaded by JavaScript, forms that require submission, or complex user interactions like checkout flows ([AI-powered monitoring handles these](https://ohdear.app/features/ai-monitoring)). Think of broken link monitoring as catching visible structural issues - the links users and Google can see. For testing complex functionality or authenticated pages, combine it with our other monitoring types. ## Who needs broken link monitoring? Anyone who can't afford SEO penalties or lost customers **E-commerce sites** where broken product pages or checkout links mean immediate lost sales. Customers hitting 404s on product pages go straight to competitors. **Content-heavy sites** (blogs, news, documentation) with hundreds or thousands of pages. Manual checking is impossible at this scale, but every broken link hurts SEO. **Agencies managing multiple client sites** who need to catch issues before clients do. Your reputation depends on all client sites staying healthy. **Teams after site migrations or redesigns** when broken links are most likely. URL structures change, redirects get missed, and 404s multiply. **SEO-focused teams** protecting organic traffic. Google penalizes sites with too many broken links, dropping rankings across the entire domain. **Anyone maintaining professional sites** where broken links make you look abandoned or unprofessional. Every 404 page damages credibility. ## Stop worrying, start monitoring Start a no-strings-attached 10-day free trial. You're all set in less than a minute. (No credit card needed.) Not convinced yet? Need help? Get in touch via . ### Let’s get technical (if you’re into that) You don’t need to be computer savvy to set up our tool. But if you are, we’re happy to explain exactly how it works and how you can customize Oh Dear to your specific needs. ## Reporting broken links how we crawl your site pages Oh Dear will crawl your site and all its pages and create a summary for you with all pages that meet these criteria: - The HTTP status code is not a **HTTP/2xx** or **HTTP/3xx** - The page took longer than 5 seconds to load We treat all pages in the **HTTP/200** to **HTTP/399** range to be OK, as long as they load in less than 5 seconds. Anything that deviates from that pattern will be reported. ## Exclude certain URLs ignore particular URL patterns Some URLs will trigger a 404 on purpose or might be more difficult to fix in the short-term. To help your notifications, you can ignore particular URL patterns per website in your settings screen per site. You can add URLs using a simple pattern. This example will ignore any crawl errors on the URLs that start with **/private/**, **/forum/admin/** or that have **/edit** anywhere in the URL. We also exclude several particular URLs globally, to avoid making these reports too noisy. ## Really into the nitty gritty details? Want to get into the nitty gritty details of our monitoring? Have a look at our documentation. ## Frequently asked questions ### Does Oh Dear find broken links automatically? Yes. Oh Dear crawls and indexes your site like a search engine would, and alerts you when it finds a broken link, internal or external, including the page it was found on. ### Will Oh Dear check my entire site for broken links and errors? Yes. The crawler follows every link on every page, so your whole site is checked, not a sample. It reports broken links, broken pages, and mixed content, with the exact location of each problem. ### What is mixed content and does Oh Dear detect it? Mixed content is an insecure HTTP resource, like an image, script, or stylesheet, loaded on an HTTPS page. Browsers may block it or mark your page insecure. Oh Dear detects mixed content on every crawl and shows you exactly where it is. ### Can Google Search Console or Google Analytics find broken links? Only after the damage is done. Search Console reports 404s once Googlebot has already hit them, and Analytics only shows traffic to error pages. Neither crawls your site looking for broken links. A dedicated crawler like Oh Dear finds them before your users and Google do. ### Do broken links affect SEO? Yes, indirectly. They waste crawl budget, leak link equity, and signal neglect. The bigger cost is usually the lost visitor who hit the dead end. Fixing them is one of the cheapest site-quality wins available. ### How do I fix broken links after switching to HTTPS? Crawl the site, find every link and resource still pointing at http://, then update or redirect each one. Oh Dear's crawler plus mixed-content detection automates the finding, and re-checks on every crawl so regressions get caught. ### Can Oh Dear check the URLs in my sitemap for broken links? Yes. Combined with [sitemap monitoring](https://ohdear.app/features/sitemap-monitoring), Oh Dear verifies your sitemap and crawls the pages it lists, so URLs that 404 don't linger in the sitemap you hand to Google. ### Can I get broken-link checking and a status page in one tool? Yes. Crawling for broken links and mixed content, uptime, SSL, and DNS monitoring, and hosted status pages are all part of one Oh Dear subscription. [See all other FAQ items →](https://ohdear.app/docs/faq) ## Start monitoring instantly Start a no-strings-attached 10-day free trial. You're all set in less than a minute. (No credit card needed.) Not convinced yet? Need help? Get in touch via .