Broken links

The broken links page in Insytful identifies all broken links found on your site or a section. Broken links can affect user experience, accessibility and trust in your content.

Insytful scans pages on your site and checks the links it finds. This includes internal links to pages on your own website and external links to other websites.

When Insytful checks a link, it looks for signs that the destination is available and responding correctly. If the destination cannot be reached, returns an error, or appears unavailable, the link may be reported as broken.

Some external website hosts, such as Cloudflare, use security, bot-prevention or anti-scraping tools. These tools can sometimes block automated checks, even when the link works for a real user in a browser. This can cause a working link to be reported as broken.

These are known as false positives.

We have improved the way Insytful checks links to reduce the number of false positives reported. False positives can never be removed entirely, but these improvements should help teams spend less time checking links that already work and more time fixing links that genuinely need attention.

You can quickly sort broken links by the URL, HTTP status code, HTTP status message, number of occurrences or the date discovered.

The URL of the link that returned in an error response.

The status code of the response e.g. 404 for content not found.

A more user-friendly response e.g. Content not found for 404 responses.

The total number of occurrences of this link we found on your scanned pages. You could have multiple occurrences of the same link on the same page. For example, you could have three occurrences on one page or three with one each on three pages.

The date Insytful found the link broken. Note that the link could have been broken before Insytful scanned it, but Insytful can only report based on the time it scanned the link first and found it broken.

Within the broken links report, you can view all broken links, or filter between:

• External broken links
• Internal broken links
• Tel links
• Mailto links

Internal links are links to pages or resources on your own site. External links are links to other websites.

External links are more likely to be affected by bot-prevention tools, temporary outages or changes outside your control.

Tel links are telephone links that are incorrectly formatted or invalid, so users cannot click them and call as intended.

Mailto links are email links that are incorrectly formatted or invalid, so users cannot click them and email as intended.

You can manually review broken links in Insytful and confirm whether they are genuinely broken or working. For each broken link, you can mark it as either:

• Mark as working: use this when you have checked the link and confirmed that it works. This tells Insytful the result is a false positive.
• Mark as broken: use this when you have checked the link and confirmed that it does not work.

Once a link has been reviewed, Insytful updates the status in the interface. The reviewed status shows whether the link is broken or working, and who reviewed it.

If Insytful reports a link as broken but you check it and find that it works, mark it as working.

This confirms that the link is a false positive. Once a link has been marked as working, it will no longer count towards your broken link total.

For more information about false positives, see why some working links appear as broken in Insytful.