Skip to main content

Check Broken Links in Website using Xenu

Nobody likes a broken link on a website. It hampers the user experience. And user may leave your site in favor of another if they encounter 404 page. It also affects the website’s search engine ranking because both users and search engines consider broken links as unprofessional. Therefore, it is wise for testers to check broken links in websites they are testing.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a free tool which checks for broken links in a website. And in a dead easy way. It scans entire website for broken links. Link verification is done on links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets and Java applets. At the end, it generates a report of the test run.
We will see how to use this tool to check for broken links on this website. Perform below steps for it.
  • Download Xenu’s Link Sleuth.
  • Extract it and run a setup.
  • Open the program, enter website URL and click OK button.
  • It will start checking for broken links on site/URL.
  • At the end a report is generated like below image.


Other features:
  • Supports SSL websites
  • Partial testing of FTP, gopher and mail URLs
  • Detects and reports redirected URLs
  • Can be used to find largest pages/images, identify duplicate content, find missing alternative text etc.
  • Let’s you check a local HTML file for broken links
The only shortcoming that we found in this tool is it’s only available for Windows platform. All in all, Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a great tool to check broken links in a website. It does what it promises without much hassle. Give it a try during your testing activities and let us know how it goes for you.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

JMeter Exceeded Maximum Number of Redirects Error Solution

While running performance test, JMeter allows maximum 5 redirects by default. However, if your system demands more than 5 redirects, it may result in JMeter exceeded maximum number of redirects error. In this post, we have listed down steps to overcome this error. Actual error in JMeter: Response code: “Non HTTP response code: java.io.IOException” Response message: “Non HTTP response message: Exceeded maximum number of redirects: 5” This error is noticed because  JMeter  allows maximum 5 redirects by default and your system may be using more than 5 redirects. You need to increase this count to more than 5 in jmeter.properties file. Follow below steps to achieve this. Navigate to /bin directory of your JMeter installation. Locate jmeter.properties file and open it in any editor. Search for “httpsampler.max_redirects” property in opened file. Uncomment the above property by removing # before it. Change to value to more than 5 Eg. 20. Save the file and restart JMeter. If

SSO with SAML login scenario in JMeter

SAML(Security Assertion Markup Language) is increasingly being used to perform single sign-on(SSO) operations. As WikiPedia puts it, SAML is an XML-based open standard data format for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties, in particular, between an identity provider and a service provider. With the rise in use of SAML in web applications, we may need to handle this in JMeter. This step-by-step tutorial shows SAML JMeter scenario to perform login operation. First request from JMeter is a GET request to fetch Login page. We need to fetch two values ‘SAMLRequest’ and ‘RelayState’ from the Login page response data. We can do this by using  Regular Expression Extractor . These two values need to be sent in POST request to service provider. Refer below image to see how to do this. We will get an HTML login page as a response to the request sent in 1st step. We need to fetch values of some hidden elements to pass it in the next request. We can do this b

A Tutorial to Send Email using JMeter

Sending email is a mundane activity in any professional’s life. It’s a common medium for communication nowadays. Therefore performance testing of email server is not only important but necessary for an organization. JMeter can be helpful to perform load testing in such scenarios. In this tutorial, we will see how JMeter can be used to send email. We will use SMTP Sampler of JMeter to send an email. JavaMail API is needed to enable email functionality in JMeter. Download it from  here  and paste the jar in JMeter’s lib folder. Now, perform below steps to configure SMTP Sampler. Add a new Thread Group under Test Plan. Right click on Thread Group and select Add–>Sampler–>SMTP Sampler. We need to populate SMTP server’s details in this sampler. We will use GMail for sending an email. For this, enter these values in SMTP Sampler fields. Server: smtp.googlemail.com, Port: 587. Provide values in Email Address From and To fields of Mail Settings section to specify sender and reci