How to find broken links in Freshdesk

Freshdesk has no built-in link checker for solution articles, so broken links pile up quietly after archives, merges and URL changes. You find them by crawling your public articles (by hand or with a tool) and checking every link against the list of articles that still exist.

This guide covers why links break in a Freshdesk knowledge base, a spreadsheet method for small help centers, and a routine that stops new breaks before they happen.

Does Freshdesk check links?

No. Freshdesk's own feature overview for the knowledge base lists multilingual articles, versioning, templates, bulk actions and approval workflows. It does not list a broken-link check, on any plan.

The gap is well known. A "Link checker function" request sits open in Freshdesk's community, and an older thread describes how deleting a solution to replace it "creates broken links in Solutions that referred to the original solution".

• What's new with the Freshdesk knowledge base (feature table by plan)
• Solutions: checking for broken links when deleting and creating new solutions (community thread)

Checked 2026-09-19 · Freshdesk support site and community

Generic website crawlers help a little, but they miss the Freshdesk-specific cases below. A link to an archived article can redirect to your portal home and return HTTP 200, so a crawler reports it as fine.

Five ways links break in Freshdesk

Two more sources of breakage sit outside Freshdesk: external pages that moved (your own app docs, a partner's site) and images hosted somewhere that has since been cleaned up.

Anchor links deserve a mention too. A link to #set-up-sso on another article breaks silently when someone renames that heading. The page still loads, so nothing looks wrong.

Find broken links by hand

For a help center under about 100 articles, a spreadsheet works. It takes an afternoon, and it gives you a baseline.

1. 01

   List every article

   Open your public portal at /support/solutions, walk each category and folder, and paste each article title and URL into a sheet. Translations have their own URLs, so list them too.
2. 02

   Extract the links

   Open each article, and copy every link and image address into a second tab with the source article next to it. Your browser's developer tools (right-click → Inspect) show links hidden behind buttons.
3. 03

   Mark internal links

   Any link containing /support/solutions/articles/ points to your own knowledge base. Look up its article ID in the first tab. No match means the target was archived, deleted or never published.
4. 04

   Check external links

   Open each external link in a private window, signed out. Note 404s, redirects to a home page and pages that now say something different.
5. 05

   Fix and record

   Relink to the right article, or remove the link. Add a "checked on" date column so the next review starts from here.

Our estimate of the effort, with the arithmetic: 100 articles × 5 links each is 500 links. At roughly 20 seconds per link to open, check and record, that is about 2.8 hours, before any fixing. It grows linearly with every article and every language.

The main weakness of the manual method: it is a snapshot. The next archive or rename breaks something the day after you finish.

Find them with a free audit

The free Freshdesk help center audit reads your public articles like any visitor would and checks links against your own article list. That catches the cases generic crawlers miss: links to archived articles that redirect, links to drafts, and links to the old portal domain.

It needs no signup and no API key. Because it only sees public pages, it can't see drafts or articles in restricted folders; the private scan through the Freshdesk API covers those.

Internal links vs external links

Treat the two kinds differently, because they break for different reasons.

Internal links (to other solution articles) break because of changes you make. They are the most damaging, because a customer following them is already mid-task. Check them against your article list, not just by HTTP status, since Freshdesk can redirect a missing article instead of returning a 404.

External links break because of changes other people make. Check them by status code and on a schedule. A monthly pass is usually enough for a small help center.

Images are a third kind. An image hosted on Freshdesk's attachment storage usually survives; an image hot-linked from your app, CDN or an old marketing site can vanish without warning.

Before you archive: check what links here

Most internal breaks are preventable. Before you archive, delete or merge an article, find every article that links to it.

1. Copy the article's ID from its URL, for example 48000123 in /support/solutions/articles/48000123-reset-your-password.
2. Search your knowledge base for that ID. Freshdesk's agent search looks at article text; the ID often appears in the HTML of linking articles, but search results for HTML attributes are not guaranteed, so also search the portal for the article's title.
3. Update each linking article to point at the replacement, then archive.
4. If the article is replaced by a merged one, say so at the top of the old article for a week before archiving, in case anyone bookmarked it.

Keep a short "archive checklist" in your team's process doc. Five minutes per archive is cheaper than a customer ticket about a dead link.

If your help center also has translations, repeat the check per language. Each translation is its own article with its own links, and a fix in English does not reach German.

For the full routine (links, freshness, duplicates, translations), use the knowledge base audit checklist. If you are about to rename a product, read how to replace text in multiple Freshdesk articles first; renames and link changes usually travel together.

Freshdesk and Freddy are trademarks of Freshworks Inc. TidyKB is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by any company named on this page.