Broken link checker for SharePoint

SharePoint stores links in three places that behave differently: hyperlinks inside page and wiki content, links in navigation and quick launch, and hyperlink columns in lists and libraries. Content is usually behind authentication, so external crawlers see a login page rather than the site. And SharePoint's own search does not report HTTP status, so a broken target is invisible until someone clicks it.

The consequence is that a checker has to run with credentials from inside the tenant or on-premises farm, or has to be pointed only at the public-facing subset of the site.

The table summarises the practical options. Each is expanded below.

Install PnP.PowerShell, connect to the site with Connect-PnPOnline, and enumerate pages with Get-PnPListItem on the Site Pages library. For each page, read the CanvasContent1 or WikiField content, extract href values with a regular expression, and deduplicate. Then test each URL with Invoke-WebRequest, treating 404, 410, and connection failures as broken and 401 or 403 as "needs credentials, check manually". Export the results to CSV with page URL, link URL, and status so owners can fix their own pages.

Repeat the same loop for hyperlink columns by enumerating lists with Get-PnPList and reading fields of type URL. Navigation links can be read with Get-PnPNavigationNode. Run the script monthly from a scheduled task or Azure Automation.

SharePoint 2013 exposes the same content through the server object model. A PowerShell script run on a farm server with Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell can iterate SPSite, SPWeb, and SPList objects, read page content and URL fields, and test targets. This needs farm-level permissions and should run outside business hours on a large farm. The alternative is a desktop crawler such as Screaming Frog configured with Windows authentication, pointed at the site collection; it handles internal and external links in one pass but may miss links inside web parts that render client-side.

Because 2013 is out of mainstream support, treat the audit as part of a migration plan: broken links are much cheaper to fix before content is moved to SharePoint Online than after.

If part of your SharePoint estate is public, for example a published communication site or an externally shared document hub, any crawler-based checker can audit it. SerionFlow's free broken link checker will crawl a public URL and list broken internal and external links without an account. It cannot see authenticated pages, and it is not a SharePoint add-in; use it for the public surface and one of the scripted methods for the rest.

Sort by page views using SharePoint site usage analytics so the most-visited pages are fixed first. For internal targets that moved, update the link or add a redirect in SharePoint Online's site redirect settings. For external targets that are gone, replace with an archived copy or remove the link. For hyperlink columns, bulk-edit in grid view. Record fixes in the CSV so the next monthly run shows progress rather than the same list.