For many small and medium sized business owners, keeping bills as low as possible is a necessity. There is really no way around it, but it is important to know where you can skimp on price and where you can’t. One of the most important and necessary elements for a successful business today is a website. Every business’ website needs to be up to date with regarding best practices in branding, development and search engine optimization
Making sure each one of these important factors are done correctly can have a positive effect on a company’s website. Yet, as with most things in life, you get what you pay for, and is your company’s website an area where you really want to penny pinch? As a website owner you must realize that everything “free” still has a price. If your website is negatively impacted by the use of free tools, then you aren’t getting much of a value, in fact it could be hurting your website. Let’s be honest, your website is really making your first impression to every client and isn’t an area that can be neglected.
One prime example that we often find is the use of free broken link checker programs. These services are used to find broken links on websites, in HTML, or in the CSS. This is something that can be done manually but can take a long time to complete. Since it becomes such time-consuming task, it often gets pushed down on the priorities list and is forgotten about. Another thing to consider is that the majority of these free services are not designed to handle much more than a basic static website. So, if you use a content management system like WordPress or Drupal, and are creating a lot of new content, (something which you should be doing) there is a good chance that these free link-checking programs will not provide a thorough check or report. This becomes a waste of your time – time that you could have been spending on other efforts to grow your business.
In addition, and depending on what platform your website or blog is running, you will find that many free broken link checker solutions simply don’t work. If it is an on-site “plugin” or “module”, they can use up server resources and slow down your entire site, making them a little counterproductive.
Another concern with free broken link checker options is that they are typically designed to be used manually, and you cannot schedule regular checks. This means that if you don’t actively manage the plug-in or add-on, the site won’t be scanned. This means you will likely miss broken links that would have been caught by other, more reputable, services. Furthermore, these user interfaces can be clunky, technical, and don’t always include options to share the reports amongst team members, not to mention there is little or no support provided. If the check is manual and you forget, no matter how great a “free” broken link checker is, it isn’t helping your website OR your bottom line.
It is much more sensible to choose a low-cost, high-quality service as part of your broken link checking regiment. Every website owner should take advantage of fast scans that run without using your website resources. Since you can schedule them to run daily or weekly you never have to worry about new broken links popping up.