Link Checker

Dreamweaver has a set of built-in reports that you can run on your site to find broken links, external links and orphaned files (files that are not linked or graphics that are not being used).

You can check links from the Results panel (select the Link Checker tab and use the icon . Or, you can select Site > Check Links from the Site pull-down menu in the Site panel. You can check links on your entire site or only check links in the files and folders you have selected (highlighted).

Dreamweaver will take anywhere from a few seconds (for a small site) to a couple minutes (for a very large site) to run the link checking function. When Dreamweaver is finished, a link check report will appear in a dialog box.

The report checks your files (or entire site) for 3 things: broken links, external links, and orphaned files. The default display is the list of broken links. Each broken link will reported on a separate line in the report. To fix a broken link, you have two options:

1. Double-click on the file name in the broken link report, and Dreamweaver will open that file and jump to the link that is broken. At this point, you should revise the link to point to the correct file and then Save your document. (When you save your document, the broken link will then disappear from your Link Checker report window).
2. You can click the name of the broken link file in the report window. This will display a file folder icon which you can use to navigate to the correct file to which are are linking. The advantage of this method is that Dreamweaver will offer to automatically update all instances of this broken link in your report window. (If you have several files with the same broken link, you should choose this method to work most efficiently within Dreamweaver.)

To view the reports on external links and orphaned files, simply select the new report view from the pull-down "Show" menu at the top of the report window:

Checking your external links report can be useful if you must change external links that appear in several pages on your site. If you make a change to an external link in your Link Checker report, Dreamweaver will ask if you want to make the same change to all other instances of that same link.

Checking your orphaned files report can be useful to find graphics and old web pages that are no longer linked in any of your files. As your website grows, you will accumulate some of these orphaned files and you may wish to periodically search for them and delete them.