External links are valuable tools for your website to interact with, load resources, or consume services across the web. Some basic examples are the URL of a YouTube video, an image stored on a different server, or a link to a resource provided by a CDN (Content Delivery Network), such as a font or a JavaScript library.
For your website to work according to your needs and users' expectations, it is important that the links pointing to the various external resources operate normally and do not return errors such as timeouts or the typical 404 (Not found).
Doing this type of “URL scanning” manually can be quite a tedious task, especially considering that faults are usually corrected only when we identify them ourselves or when a third party reports them to us.
There are tools such as Google Search Console that allow you to do crawling, generally of internal or external links pointing to your site. However, if you require a tool that allows you to track all the external links that are configured on your site and, in addition, know their exact location, the URL Status Scanner module is the ideal tool.
The URL Status Scanner module has been developed to monitor external URLs found within the site in order to identify broken links, misconfigured links, or those that do not give the expected response.
Features:
For this scanning, the module offers 3 options:
- Scan inside the code base of modules and custom themes.
- Scan inside configuration objects.
- Scan inside content entities (such as articles, base pages, blocks, comments, etc.).
The scan results can be viewed in the dashboard available at the url '/admin/url-status-scanner/dashboard', where information such as the processed URL, response code and its location can be displayed. For URLs that are within the code base, the file path and line number will be indicated; for URLs that are part of the configuration, the name of the configuration object will be shown; and for URLs that are in the content, the type of entity, the name of the bundle, its ID and the name of the field where the processed URL is located will be indicated.


In the URL 'admin/url-status-scanner/settings' you can select the options in which URL scanning can be executed.

The 'Codebase' option will scan URLs in codebase files, such as modules or custom themes.
The 'Configuration Objects' option will scan URLs in the various configuration objects found on the site.
The “Content” option will scan the URLs of different types of content, such as articles, base pages, blocks, comments, etc. The execution time of this scan depends on the number of entities and content packages present on the site, so on large sites the scan may take time.
The scan results can be downloaded in CSV or XLSX format for further analysis. In addition, this module is compatible with Drupal multisite projects, requiring Drupal Core version 10 or higher.
For more details, visit: https://www.drupal.org/project/url_status_scanner. This module was developed by the Seed EM Development Team.