Broken Links
Having broken links in a website is a big draw back. It prevents users from browsing your site and search engines from indexing your site.
You should try to test, find out and resolve any broken links in your website.
Test from a Website Development Software
Many website development softwares now a days provide this feature.
Most softwares provide a site wide link check to find out about any broken links in a website. These softwares also prevent you from leaving broken links while deleting pages. They inform you about all the pages that point into the page you are deleting, so that you can update it.
Since the documentation of each software is differenet, there is no general way of describing how you do it. Just find out how your development software can detect broken links and run tests.
Online Testing Tool
Online testing of broken links is much more effective than offline testing.
This is because your final web site in on the server or the test server and you may forget uploading some pages or forget after renaming some pages before uploading.
Your web site may include external links, which are best tested this way. Offline testing cannot detect these errors while online can.
To check broken or dead links in you uploaded site, use the free tool from W3C:
Just enter the address of a page of your website and this tools will check all the links pointing from this document, both Internal and External.
This valuable tool give you a few additional details about you website too. So don't forget to try out this tool.
Related:
Offline Testing
Online Testing
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