Finding and Fixing Broken Links

Finding and Fixing Broken Links Image

We provide two ways for editors to find broken links on their site. Both have their benefits and their drawbacks.

CHSSWeb Link Checker

The link checker built into CHSSWeb finds broken links on your site by scanning the content (pages, articles, events, people, etc.) on your site, finding URLs in various fields, and then trying those URLs.

Advantages:

  • Because it's scanning based on content types, it gives you a link directly to the edit page for the item containing the broken URL
  • You can trigger a rescan from within CHSSWeb

Disadvantages:

  • It can get false positives (for various reasons)
  • Because it's scanning based on content types and logic, it doesn't catch everything

Dubbot

The university uses an outside tool called Dubbot to scan our sites for broken links, accessibility, and other web governance issues. We have integrated that tool with CHSSWeb so that you can see broken link listings when you edit key content types of content. This is a new feature as of October of 2022, and we hope to develop it further to make it more helpful and easier to use.

Advantages:

  • Fewer false positives (we've seen none so far, in fact)
  • Because it is scanning based on the end user's view of each pages, it catches everything

Disadvantages:

  • Because it is scanning based on the outside view, it can detect a broken link on a page that actually comes from a content type displayed on that page (an Article with a broken link can appear on a Page, for instance)
  • We are able to list the broken links but we cannot (yet) tell you what field contains a given link
  • You cannot trigger a fresh scan, so your item's edit page will show the broken links until the next scheduled dubbot scan

We hope to improve the integration to lessen or eliminate some of those disadvantages. We also hope to reach a point where we can highlight other useful things that Dubbot detects. And, finally, we hope we will be able to invite editors into Dubbot so they can take advantage of its tools directly. We will let you know when we make progress on these fronts.