Validating Broken Links Using Selenium

 Broken links can damage a website’s credibility, user experience, and SEO performance. Regularly checking and fixing these links is essential. Selenium, a popular automation testing tool, can be used effectively to validate broken links on web pages.

What Is a Broken Link?

A broken link (or dead link) leads to a non-existent page, returning an error like "404 Not Found." These links can result from changes in URLs, removed content, or incorrect paths.

Why Use Selenium?

Selenium automates browser interactions and can be used to extract all links from a webpage. However, Selenium alone cannot check the link status (HTTP response code). For that, we combine it with Java’s HttpURLConnection or Python’s requests library.

Step-by-Step: Validating Links with Selenium in Python

1. Setup Environment

Install required packages:

pip install selenium requests

Import the libraries:

from selenium import webdriver

import requests

2. Open the Webpage and Extract Links

driver = webdriver.Chrome()

driver.get("https://example.com")

links = driver.find_elements("tag name", "a")

3. Validate Each Link

for link in links:

    url = link.get_attribute("href")

    if url is not None and url.startswith("http"):

        try:

            response = requests.head(url, timeout=5)

            if response.status_code >= 400:

                print(f"Broken link: {url} - Status code: {response.status_code}")

            else:

                print(f"Valid link: {url}")

        except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:

            print(f"Error checking link: {url} - {e}")

4. Close the Browser

driver.quit()

Best Practices

Avoid checking mailto: or JavaScript links.

Use requests.head() instead of get() for faster execution.

Set timeouts to avoid hanging.

Run checks during off-peak hours to reduce server load.

Conclusion

Validating broken links with Selenium ensures your website remains user-friendly and SEO-compliant. Though Selenium extracts links efficiently, combining it with HTTP status checks is the key to finding broken URLs. Automating this process helps maintain a clean, professional website and improves user trust.

Learn Selenium Java Training in Hyderabad

Read More:

Using TestNG with Selenium for Test Automation

Understanding Page Object Model in Selenium Java

Taking Screenshots with Selenium in Java

How to Run Selenium Tests in Headless Mode

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