Rebuilding Link Checking for the Modern Web

Broken Links, Broken Trust

As a website or documentation maintainer, you know that broken links ruin user experience and damage trust.

• Outdated links are frustrating, and can cause your readers to bounce.
• Broken links prevent access critical information about your product or service.
• This can ultimately lead to a loss of potential customers and profits.

Other Link Checkers Just Don't Work

You can avoid this problem by regularly checking and updating your links, but traditionally, tools used to detect broken links have a few common flaws:

They...

• are slow.
• produce a high number of false-positives.
• only support a single file format (HTML or Markdown, not both).
• are hard to install because they aren't distributed as a single binary.

Because of these problems, people give up on checking their links altogether, leading to more broken links.

Rebuilding Link Checking for the Modern Web: Starting From First Principles

In order to address this issue, I began developing a faster and more reliable link checker, written in Rust, that utilizes fewer resources. This tool, named lychee, is more feature-complete than other available options.

Lychee checks thousands, if not millions, of links every week. It's used by many big projects, such as Amazon's OpenSearch, as well as by companies like Microsoft and Google.

I Can't Do It Without You

Despite its popularity and effectiveness, however, lychee is currently facing a severe lack of funding which makes it difficult to keep the project sustainable. This lack of funding poses a big threat to the ecosystem, as it means less maintenance and fewer bug fixes.

I would greatly appreciate your support in making the development of lychee sustainable. Without sponsorship, I find myself having to take on additional consulting work, which limits the time I am able to dedicate to open source projects. My goal is to make working on lychee and related projects like lychee-action a viable long-term career path.

Please pick a support tier to make this vision a reality. Thanks for your support ❤️

Not convinced?

If you want to learn more about what lychee can do, why not check out the lychee website? Also, feel free to reach out or schedule a meeting to discuss how we can collaborate.