Using the Enterramon Broken Link Checker

Drop in a domain and the tool crawls up to 25 pages starting from your homepage, following the same links a visitor or a search bot would run into. It checks your sitemap against what it actually finds, flags broken links and images along the way, and calls out missing ALT text. No account, no setup, just a URL.

Head to enterramon.com/broken-link-checker, drop in the domain, hit Run. Behind the button it pulls robots.txt first, finds your sitemap, then crawls the real site separately, homepage outward, checking every link and image it passes along the way.

How it crawls

A sitemap can list five pages or five thousand, so it doesn’t crawl through the sitemap itself. It crawls your actual site, homepage first, following internal links outward, and checks the sitemap separately. That’s a deliberate split, not a shortcut, because a large sitemap on its own tells you what should exist, not what’s actually reachable, and cross-referencing the two afterward is where the useful findings show up. Pages listed in your sitemap that the crawl never reached from anywhere, and pages the crawl found that never made it into the sitemap at all, both surface here.

Sitemap URLs get queued alongside whatever the homepage links to, not just followed link by link. Plenty of real pages, a pricing page, a checkout flow, a landing page tucked behind a nav dropdown, never show up in the homepage’s own outbound links even though they’re genuinely part of the site. Seeding the crawl from the sitemap too means those get checked directly instead of depending on the crawler stumbling onto them.

Whatever’s in robots.txt applies the whole way through, not just at the start. A path under Disallow gets skipped rather than crawled anyway or checked against the sitemap, same as a real search bot would treat it.

What comes back

Every link on every crawled page gets checked, internal and external, and so does every image. A link that 404s or fails to resolve is broken, plain and simple. A 301 or 302 gets its own separate flag instead, not broken, just something worth pointing straight at its final destination rather than sending visitors and crawlers through a redirect hop first. A 401, 403, 429, or anything in the 500s gets flagged as possibly blocked rather than broken, since plenty of servers return those to anything that isn’t a real browser, and treating that the same as a dead link would bury genuine breakage under noise.

We hit exactly that kind of noise while building this. Cloudflare rewrites obfuscated email links to a placeholder path that only resolves back to a real address through JavaScript running in a browser, so a plain request to it always comes back 404, and early testing flagged that as a broken link on every single page it appeared on. Same story with tracking pixels, a Facebook Pixel image with no ALT attribute isn’t a missing-ALT issue, it’s not content in the first place. Both get filtered out now, but it’s a good reminder that a crawler checking raw HTTP responses doesn’t automatically see a page the way a browser does.

One more pattern worth knowing by name. Every so often a broken link isn’t really a dead page, it’s a full URL pasted into a field meant to hold a relative path, so the site ends up linking to something like yourdomain.com/https://otherdomain.com/page/. That’s genuinely broken, the request does 404, but the fix isn’t a missing page, it’s a setting or shortcode somewhere on that page pointing at the wrong kind of value. Findings like this get a note flagging the pattern directly rather than leaving you to spot it in a list of otherwise-ordinary dead links.

Images work the same way for broken checks, and separately, each one gets checked for ALT text. An empty alt="" isn’t flagged, that’s usually a deliberate signal for a decorative image. A missing attribute entirely is.

The 25-page limit, and what “sitemap is large” actually means

The crawl sticks to the pages closest to your homepage in link depth, the ones a visitor or a bot actually reaches first, now widened by sitemap seeding as above. For a small site that’s most or all of it. For a large one it’s a sample, and the results say so rather than implying otherwise. If your sitemap lists 400 URLs and the crawl only reached 25, a clean result means clean for that 25, not a full-site guarantee.

If you see “Your sitemap is large, only a portion of it was checked in this run,” that’s not a vague caveat, it’s a specific thing that happened. Both the crawl and the separate sitemap check run against a wall-clock time budget rather than a page count alone, so a site with a lot of pages, or pages carrying a lot of links and images each, can hit the time limit before working through everything, even under the 25-page cap. It’s the same trade-off behind why this is an on-demand tool and not something that takes minutes to return a result, a hard ceiling on time so a check always finishes in a reasonable window, at the cost of sometimes trading completeness for that.

What this isn’t

It’s a link and image audit, not a full SEO crawl. It doesn’t look at keyword targeting, content quality, or page speed. For sitemap best-practice checks alongside crawl-rule syntax specifically, the Robots.txt Tester covers the Allow/Disallow side of things in more depth than this tool needs to. For how fast the pages it’s crawling actually load, that’s the full Enterramon site report.