Xenu's Link Sleuth for Windows

Find and fix your site’s broken links

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a web scraping software that checks for broken links on sites. Developed by Tilman Hausherr, the link verification application looks for all URLs, images, backgrounds, frames, and maps present on a website so users can sort them by their preferred criteria. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is capable of testing FTP, gopher, and SSL websites. The program is quite powerful, works fast, and is available for free to all users.

What is Xenu’s Link Sleuth?

On the surface, broken URLs on your website may not seem that bad. But they can seriously impact your search engine ranking, user experience, and your company’s online reputation. To get rid of them or to fix them, you must first find all the links that no longer work. Doing this manually can not only be time-consuming but can give you false results. Instead, it's best to look at apps like Xenu’s Link Sleuth.

Developed for Windows, the link verification application checks sites for broken URLs, standard links, plug-ins, scripts, images, and maps. The program refreshes the list of links that it finds in real-time so you can take care of any problem that arises quickly. Xenu’s Link Sleuth supports both SSL and FTP sites and reports on all broken and redirected URLs.

Simple interface

Xenu features a clean interface with drop-down menus and clearly-marked icons. Moreover, you don’t need to be tech-savvy or learn a programming language like Java to operate the software. All you have to do is click on the ‘File’ option and paste the URL that you’d liked checked. You can even check files available on your system, so you can check links using different sorting criteria before uploading any page to your site.

The beginner-friendly interface of Xenu’s Link Sleuth makes it easier to check multiple levels of links without much hassle. When you paste a link, a pop-up window will appear, letting you set the levels for the spider to crawl. Every level that you add will increase the overall processing time. That said, the program still does a fast job and can check up to 100 links in less than a minute.

What does Xenu do?

When you run Xenu’s Link Sleuth download to check a website, it returns with an easy-to-read yet long report of all the links present on the site, both functioning and non-functioning. It also includes pages with 404 errors or broken redirects. You can easily double-click on any link to see the resulting page or pull-up the properties dialog box to gather any additional information.

The link verification application lets users decide on the type of output they want. You can paste the link of your website on the program and request a list of all URLs or only the broken and redirected ones. Since the program continues to check links simultaneously, the program continually shows the status of all links. If you see a URL in green, that means it’s working perfectly. If it’s in red, there are problems.

Look for broken links

There are many tasks that Xenu’s Link Sleuth can do for your website’s overall ranking. Its primary purpose, though, is to help you find all broken links and hyperlinks on your website quickly and with limited manual intervention. Moreover, the program lets you find broken links of any website on the internet, so you can get an idea about how other sites function and learn more about your competition’s best SEO practices.

Find heavy images

Adding pictures to your website can make it memorable, but it can also increase the load time, thereby impacting user experience and SEO score. To find images with the largest file size and improve your site’s ranking, you can select Xenu’s general crawl option. It will not only find all links but will let you sort them using the size column. Clicking on the link will help you access whether or not it’s an image file that requires optimization.

Analyze your site’s architecture

The best part about using Xenu’s Link Sleuth is that it gives your entire website’s URL structure, including links to plug-ins, images, backgrounds, frames, and image maps in a downloadable excel file. It also lists all metrics in columns and shows the number of clicks it would need to reach from your home page to an internal page. This is useful information to determine whether or not internal pages are getting any traffic.

How fast is Xenu’s Link Sleuth?

Xenu’s Link Sleuth uses the Preemptive Multithreading model, in which a link checking software opens several web sites simultaneously. While this version of the program comes with a default thread count of 30 links, you can take it up to 100 pages in one go. Checking large counts of pages all at one can result in timeouts, so you must be careful about selecting the maximum number of threads.

How many URLS can Xenu's Link Sleuth check?

When you download Xenu’s Link Sleuth Windows 10, you don’t have to worry about the maximum number of URLs the program can check. This is because the program offers unlimited use. Thee number of links that it can check falls somewhere between a million or so, which is more than enough for small to medium-sized organizations.

Are there any alternatives?

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is free to download and makes it easier for users to keep a check on their website. However, it does come with a learning curve for people who have never worked with sitemaps and scripts. So if you want to check out alternatives, you can explore HTML Link Validator, SEO PowerSuite Free, Web Link Validator, Fast Link Checker, and Website Auditor.

Should I download Xenu’s Link Sleuth?

If you’re looking for a Windows utility tool that helps you monitor and manage your website’s links, you should download Xenu’s Link Sleuth. It’s an easy-to-use program with many features that can help you improve your website’s SEO and search engine ranking. It can help you identify broken links and heavy files, so you can make the necessary changes without too much hassle.