How To Find Broken Links Using Selenium WebDriver

One of the key test case is to find broken links on a webpage. Due to existence of broken links, your website reputation gets damaged and there will be a negative impact on your business. It’s mandatory to find and fix all the broken links before release. If a link is not working, we face a message as 404 Page Not Found.

Let’s see some of the HTTP status codes.

200 – Valid Link

404 – Link not found

400 – Bad request

401 – Unauthorized

500 – Internal Error

Consider a test case to test all the links in the home page of “http://newtours.demoaut.com"

Below code fetches all the links of a given website (i.e., http://newtours.demoaut.com) using WebDriver commands and reads the status of each href link with the help of HttpURLConnection class.

Example: 

import java.io.IOException;
import java.net.HttpURLConnection;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;

public class BrokenLinks {
public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException, IOException {

// Instantiating FirefoxDriver
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C://Drivers/chromedriver_win32/chromedriver.exe");
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

// Maximize the browser
driver.manage().window().maximize();

// Implicit wait for 10 seconds
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);

// To launch pavantestingtools.com
driver.get("http://newtours.demoaut.com/");

// Wait for 5 seconds
Thread.sleep(5000);

// Used tagName method to collect the list of items with tagName "a"
// findElements - to find all the elements with in the current page. It
// returns a list of all webelements or an empty list if nothing matches
List links = driver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));

// To print the total number of links
System.out.println("Total links are " + links.size());

// used for loop to
for (int i = 0; i < links.size(); i++) {
WebElement element = links.get(i);
// By using "href" attribute, we could get the url of the requried
// link
String url = element.getAttribute("href");

URL link = new URL(url);
// Create a connection using URL object (i.e., link)
HttpURLConnection httpConn = (HttpURLConnection) link.openConnection();
// Set the timeout for 2 seconds
httpConn.setConnectTimeout(2000);
// connect using connect method
httpConn.connect();
// use getResponseCode() to get the response code.
if (httpConn.getResponseCode() >= 400) {
System.out.println(url + " - " + "is Broken Link");
} else {
System.out.println(url + " - " + "is valid Link");
}
}
}
}