9 Incredible Open Source Tools for Checking LinksA typical website page consists of content, links, and multimedia elements. Such web pages are expected to perform well across multiple browsers, locations, and servers. Website testing ensures the functionality of an application or website by checking its compatibility with different browsers, operating systems, and hardware platform. This includes checking your web application for potential bugs and broken links. Links are an integral part of any website, and it’s very much required to ensure that none of them is broken.

Depending upon the situation, a link might get inactive after being added. This affects the performance of a website. However, there are various open source tools that can be used to find broken links on a website.

Bugkilla

This tool is used to perform functional testing of J2EE based applications. You can automate the execution of tests for business logic layer and web front end using this set of Java tools.

Link Checker

This website validation tool comes free of cost and allows you to check links of the complete website. However, it requires you to run Python 2.7.2 or later.

Link Page Generator

It is an automatic program used for managing links. In addition, the user-friendly interface with easy check option allows you to mark and eliminate bad links.

Ht-Check

The package includes the PHP interface, which is responsible for giving most of the information. This helps in querying the database and outputs a simple report. The MySQL database is used to store the retrieved information. However, you must have a MySQL connectivity module and Web server to use it.

JSpider

It is used to generate web traffic. Moreover, you can also manage and configure its behavior as per your need.

LinkVerify

It checks the validity of links with references to external resources. This includes hyperlinks, embedded images, and style sheets.

Jenu

It is a multithreaded website URL link checker tool. It’s similar to Xenu, the multi-threaded link checker tool for PC.

Dead Link Check (DLC)

It allows easy checking of the results and efficiently handles multiple requests with a link cache file.  The generated output is in HTML.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

The tool checks broken link on the website. You can verify the links on images, frames, background, style sheets, scripts, and more. This tool is free, but not open source.

Learn more about open source web testing tools in Java