Check Links with Dreamweaver

Checking links doesn't have to be a chore. If you have good tools you can make sure that your Web site stays cohesive and you don't have link rot. Dreamweaver includes a site checker that will check the links on your site and list the external and orphan pages.

Broken Site Links

When you check your site or a page with Dreamweaver, it verifies the links within your site. You might think that links within your Web site are not going to go bad, but you would be surprised. The longer that your site is live the more likely there will be pages that are deleted or moved and you don't get all the pages updated.

Dreamweaver makes it easy to check your site for broken internal links. And, if you move a file using Dreamweaver it will ask you if you want to check your site and update it. This is a great feature because it helps prevent the link rot before it happens.

External Links

Dreamweaver doesn't verify external links. But it does list them for you. When you run the link checking script, you can then see all the external links on your site or the page. This makes it easier to check them manually.

How to Check Links on a Page

1. Open a page in your site, or if the page you're editing isn't part of a Dreamweaver site, then save it into a site.
2. Go to the File menu and choose Check Page | Check Links.
3. Dreamweaver will open the broken links in a new panel.
4. If you want to see the external links, change the report type to External Links.

How to Check Links on the Entire Site

1. In the Files panel, choose the site you would like to check.
2. In the Site menu, click on "Check Links Sitewide" or click on Shift-F8 (Windows) or Apple-F8 (Macintosh).
3. If you want to see the orphan files in the site, change the report type to Orphaned Files.

Orphan Pages

After you check your entire site for broken links Dreamweaver also provides you with a list of the orphan pages on the site. Orphan pages are pages that no longer have any links to them. Once you know about files on your site that aren't linked to you can either remove them or link to them again.