One task that no webmaster looks forward to is checking their site for broken links. In terms of popularity, I’d say it’s the web equivalent of flossing (and is done about as frequently by most site owners too).
So it’s nice to find a tool that makes this task a little less painful, and one that checks your site for spelling errors too.
I’ve been using Inspyder Insite ($49.95) for a couple of weeks and overall I’ve been quite impressed by it.
The tool is certainly easy to use — to check your site you simply type in the root URL and hit go.
It then indexes your site, catching broken links and spelling errors along the way. A custom dictionary allows you to exclude certain words, so that the spell checking part becomes quicker and easier each time you crawl your site.
InSite is also full-featured enough to be able to access password protected pages, exclude individual pages, create customized HTML and CSV reports and be set to run on a scheduled basis.
If InSite finds a broken link, you can right click on the line in question within the tool and choose from the context menu whether you want to open the page in a browser or an editor. It’s as straight-forward to use as it sounds.
One improvement that would be helpful is for the link anchor text to be captured and displayed. This would make actually hunting down and fixing those broken links a little easier, especially on content-heavy pages.
My solution for this has been to use the LinkChecker FireFox extension, which makes it a snap to find the broken link.
The real selling point for Inspyder InSite is the price. Most commercial link checking tools are more expensive, and many charge you according to a sliding scale based on how large your web site is. With InSite you can check any size of site.
Of course, there is a free link checker alternative, which works just fine, but it isn’t as full-featured and doesn’t have a user-friendly interface.
There is also another commercial alternative that I would recommend, although it is rather more expensive.
All-in-all Inspyder InSite is a solid, full-featured tool that does what is supposed to do well, and at an affordable price.
I have used the xenu program before but that is really stiff and like you said un-user friendly.
I like the idea of having the spell checker to be honest. Does it also do grammar checking? My writing is the hardest when designing new websites.
Dreamweaver has a feature for doing this if you are using dreamweaver best not go out and buy software to do this also if you have a Google site map this can also help to check these things
Inspyder Insite is great software that I strongly recommend. I use it to check for broken links and spell check my website (New York Web Design Company) and client’s sites as well. The only thing I don’t agree with is the costly price, $49.95 for spell checking is a little too high. There’re free online applications out there that will check for broken links.
Has Xenu gotten over being a RAM hog? I used to leave my computer working on our web site over the weekend because over night was not long enough. Doubling my RAM to 1GB allowed it to finish overnight. Xenu working on just a portion of the site resulted in numerous false positives.
Unless its improved, I wouldn’t recommend Xenu for web sites with more than a few thousand pages.
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Inspyder Insite doesn’t do grammar checking. I think that would be a bit much to ask for the price and not that useful, to be honest.
As for the price, if you use it regularly and it works well, $50 is a very reasonable price to pay, in my view.
I’m not a big fan of Xenu, but I thought I would mention it as a long-standing free alternative. I found it too user-unfriendly, however.
isnt all this available with dreamweaver dont see the point in buying software like this if you already have dreamweaver for your website design
Is it smart enough to recognize the difference between real broken links and 404 pages that may come from changing the post-slug in wordpress, for instance? If so, then it is definitely worth the price, but I don’t think it would be so easy to include a feature like that – it takes human intelligence to recognize all types of 404’s. Anyway, great posts, like your site.
LinkChecker looks good, but I’d be careful when using it with poorly designed admin panels as when it checks for links it may delete items etc. Although I think I’ll be using it, as I hate clicking dodgy links. Cheers.