Last week's moment — I'm still blushing
Old client Awei pulled me into a group chat. The new client wanted a look at my past work. I tossed them a blog link, they clicked the first recommended tool's homepage — got a blank page. I went red on the spot. That article was from 2021, and the tool I quoted had already shut down.
Then I spent half an hour scanning three years of my blog — 23 outbound links, all dead. You might be making the same mistake. You just haven't been caught yet.
How bad is it really, and who's actually doing this?
Someone ran an actual study: scanned 650,000+ pages' outbound links, found more than half were either 404s (dead links), quietly redirected somewhere else, or had completely changed content. Indies have it worse — we write an article once and forget about it, but the sites we link to get redesigned, shut down, or acquired. Links rot quietly.
Indie dev Lao Wang told me he spends an hour each quarter scanning all his pages. Lin Xia, who runs a personal IP, runs a scan after every long post. It's not complicated, but 90% of us don't do it on our own — including past me.
You can run this today
Money: $0
Time: under 30 minutes
Tech barrier: paste a URL into a webpage and click a button — no code needed
First step: open deadlinkchecker.com, paste your blog or site URL, hit enter
You'll get a list when it's done — red means dead (opens to 404-style pages), yellow means caution (might redirect to different content). Click each one, decide whether to fix the link, delete it, or swap in a new resource. If you're on WordPress, install the "Broken Link Checker" plugin — it scans in the background and checks every new post on publish.
For friends at different stages
Just starting / no site yet: Don't rush it now, just bookmark this idea. Wait until you have your first landing page or blog.
Got 1-2 clients: Run the scan today. One bad first impression can lose you a deal — clients won't tell you "your link is broken," they'll just walk away quietly.
Scaling up / content keeps piling up: Pick one fixed day each month as "dead link day," like spring cleaning. This tool isn't for everyone, but content piling up means you'll face it eventually.
I'm not a tech expert, and I put this off for two years before doing it. But you seeing that row of red on your own site is way better than a client seeing it — because that one, you'd never even know about.