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EnglishCan Dr. Link Check Run Scheduled Link Checks Automatically?
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Yes. Dr. Link Check can run link checks automatically on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule, and it can send status reports to you by email. This is the feature to use if you want to catch link rot early instead of discovering broken links when visitors report them. The scheduling option is described on the site's home page alongside the core checking features; the public page does not list which plans include it, so confirm availability on the Pricing page before relying on it.
How scheduled checks fit into the workflow
A scheduled check repeats the same crawl-and-check process you would otherwise start manually:
- Input: a start URL for your site.
- Action: the bot crawls the HTML and CSS of the site, finds internal links, outbound links, and links to resources such as images and style sheets, and runs each link through multiple checks.
- Output: a report of links that need attention, delivered by email on your chosen schedule.
Because the crawl begins at a start URL and follows what it finds, scheduling works best for a defined site or section rather than a loose collection of unrelated pages.
What each scheduled run checks
Every link found passes through several checks, so a scheduled report covers more than simple 404s:
| Check | What it looks for |
|---|---|
| Broken link check | Malformed URLs, slow server responses, invalid SSL certificates, and error codes such as 404 (missing page) or 500 (server error) |
| Blacklist check | Whether the link appears on blacklists for hosting malicious content |
| Soft error check | Pages that return a 200 OK code but whose content indicates something is wrong with the link |
The soft error check is the one most likely to surface problems a manual click-through would miss, since the page technically loads.
Reading and acting on the reports
Scheduled emails are only useful if the results are easy to work through. Dr. Link Check's reports range from a high-level summary down to the exact locations of the found links in the code, and results can be sorted, filtered, and exported to CSV for further processing in Microsoft Excel. A practical routine is to open the summary first, filter to the error types you care about, then use the code locations to fix each link.
Deciding whether to turn scheduling on
Scheduling is worth enabling if your site changes regularly or links to external sites you don't control, since those are the links most likely to break without warning. If your site is small and rarely edited, a manual check when you publish changes may be enough. Either way, the first step is the same: run a check from your start URL, review the report, and then decide whether the recurring email is something you'll actually act on.