How to Check Links Before Publishing

Short demonstration: a pre-publish pass

1. Scan the version you are about to ship. Load the staging URL or draft preview as a reviewer would see it, then click the CheckLinks toolbar icon. The first click starts a scan; later clicks show or hide the panel. If the icon is hidden, open Chrome's Extensions menu and pin CheckLinks. The scan reads the page's main-document <a href> links and shows status outlines in context while the panel fills in.
2. Triage by the panel's summary. Select Broken for most 4xx and 5xx responses. Select Redirect to inspect links that resolve through a redirect; the result shows the final response and final URL. Select Other for Needs access, Rate limited, timeouts, network errors, and skipped links. 401/403/429 results are unverified and are not necessarily broken.
3. Use Show on page for the fix. Select a result's Show on page control to scroll to the matching link. Check the surrounding sentence, then correct the URL in the CMS, Markdown, template, or component that produced it. A valid response does not make an incorrect destination or misleading anchor text good.
4. Re-scan the corrected page. Run a fresh scan after the edits are present in the same staging or preview environment. Work from the new result set so a previously captured failure does not get mistaken for current evidence.
5. Export the handoff. When the remaining findings are understood, click Export all CSV. It exports every result regardless of the selected filter, including a partial report after Stop. The local report includes full URL, response, category, status text, and final redirect URL when one is available; it may also include the page URL and link text.

What to verify before you call it clean

Use the HTTP result as one gate in a release checklist. Read the destination, confirm the link supports the claim around it, and check that the page is intended to be discoverable. A 200 response can still lead to the wrong article, an empty app route, a noindex page, or content that does not match the anchor.

For a small site, scan the pages changed in the release plus the shared navigation, footer, and high-traffic landing pages. If a template produces many links, scan a representative rendered page and separately inspect any route or asset types the page does not expose as anchors.