Fast Link Checker Lite Editor's Review

When it comes to the quality of a website, there are many factors that count. Some might say content, others - back-linking, relevance, keywords and so on. To be honest, we cannot know for sure which are really the most important factors search engines consider while giving a page rank/score to web page. But, we know for sure that the quality of the links matters. It's clear that broken links have a very bad impact on visitors, but they also harm your search engine rankings. A tool that will become very handy when it comes to website maintenance is Fast Link Checker Lite.

Fast Link Checker Lite is a free utility that can check a website for broken links. It starts checking links from a specified URL and processes all found pages on the website until all links are checked. It can check links to different resource types on both current and external sites, check all static and dynamic HTTP and HTTPS pages, FTP, FTPS and RTSP links. Moreover, it can check links in HTML files directly, without accessing a web server.

To start checking a website for broken links, just click on the 'New' button from the top right corner of the main interface, then, enter a URL and click 'Start'. Soon after, Fast Link Checker Lite will start checking the website for broken links. The scanning process can be aborted, paused and restarted from the buttons on top toolbar. Moreover, the process can be viewed in frames or tabs by selecting the respective options. To save the scanned information as a file, use the 'Export' button.

If you step into the program Settings, you find options regarding URL timeout, the number of network connections, the maximum number of network connections to the same server, user agent identification, operating system, HTTP protocol, configuring proxy settings, cookies and much more.

Pluses: user-friendly reports on found broken links that can be saved to a file;

Drawbacks / flaws: it does not support Mozilla Firefox or Chrome for user agent identification;

In conclusion: An excellent free tool for monitoring and identifying broken links for any website.

version reviewed: 2.0