Checking one URL's status code is trivial. Checking three hundred of them — after a site migration, across a content library, or through an exported sitemap — is where doing it one at a time falls apart. A bulk HTTP status checker requests every URL together and hands you a single sortable table, so a job that would take an afternoon of clicking takes about a minute.
What a bulk HTTP status check does
Every time a browser or crawler requests a URL, the server replies with a three-digit HTTP status code — 200 for OK, 301 for a permanent redirect, 404 for not found, 500 for a server error, and so on. A bulk checker automates the boring part: instead of you loading each page and reading its response, it fires a request at every URL in your list, follows any redirects, and records the final status code, the redirect path, and the response time for each one.
The result is a table you can sort and filter. That single shift — from checking URLs sequentially to seeing all of them at once — is what makes large audits practical. You stop hunting for problems and start reading a list of them.
How to check 100 URLs at once
With HTTP Tiger's bulk checker the whole flow is free and needs no account:
- Gather your URLs. Copy them from a sitemap, a crawl export, your analytics “top pages” report, or a spreadsheet column. One URL per line.
- Paste up to 100 per batch. The free tier accepts 100 URLs at a time, up to 5,000 checks a month. For a bigger site, split the list and run consecutive batches.
- Run the check. Every URL is requested in parallel, so a full batch resolves in seconds rather than minutes.
- Sort by status code. Push the
200s to the bottom and bring the3xx,4xx, and5xxrows to the top — those are the only ones that need you. - Export to CSV. Save the results for a report, a ticket, or a before/after comparison.
http:// and non-www variants are where redirect chains and surprise 404s hide, so don't normalize them away before you check.Reading the results: 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, 5xx
Status codes fall into families, and in an audit you triage by family before you look at individual codes:
| Family | Means | Common codes | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
2xx | Success — page is healthy | 200, 204 | Nothing. These are fine. |
3xx | Redirect | 301, 302, 308 | Confirm a permanent move is a 301, not a 302; collapse long chains. |
4xx | Client error — page missing/blocked | 404, 410, 403 | Fix the page or add a redirect to a relevant replacement. |
5xx | Server error — treat as an outage | 500, 502, 503 | Investigate the server; re-check once resolved. |
Two subtleties worth knowing. A 302 on a page that has permanently moved is a bug — it keeps the old URL indexed and withholds ranking signals from the new one, so it should be a 301. And a page that returns 200 but shows a “not found” message is a soft 404: the status code lies, so you'll need to spot-check pages that look healthy but shouldn't exist. For the full list, see the HTTP status codes reference or look up any single code on httptiger.org.
Use case: SEO site-migration audit
Migrations — a redesign, a domain change, a URL-structure cleanup — are where bulk status checking earns its keep. A single un-redirected URL can drop a page that used to rank, and you won't notice until traffic falls. The audit is simple and you run it twice:
- Before you migrate, export the complete list of live, indexed URLs from the old site — from the XML sitemap, a crawl, or your analytics. This is your source of truth.
- After you migrate, run that exact same list through the bulk HTTP status checker.
- Grade every row. Each old URL should return one of two things: a
200(the URL still exists in place) or a301that lands on the correct new URL. Anything else is a defect:
- A
404is a page you dropped without redirecting — add a 301 to its closest replacement. - A
302on a permanent move is leaking equity — change it to a 301. - A
301that lands on another redirect is a chain — point the first hop straight at the final page. - A
200you didn't expect may be an orphaned old page still live — decide whether to redirect or remove it.
Because you see the whole list at once, you can hand a developer a single spreadsheet of “these 40 URLs are broken” instead of reporting them one trickle at a time.
Use case: finding broken links at scale
The same technique finds dead links anywhere you have a list of URLs:
- Outbound links in content: pull every external link from an article or resource page and batch-check them — link rot means yesterday's good link is today's
404. - Product and category pages: verify an entire catalog is reachable before a big campaign sends traffic to it.
- A whole sitemap: feed your
sitemap.xmlURLs through in batches to confirm every page you're telling Google about actually returns200.
Any row returning 404 or 410 is a dead link to fix or remove; any 5xx is a destination that's temporarily failing and worth a re-check. For crawling a site's internal links specifically, pair this with the dedicated broken link checker, which follows links page-to-page rather than working from a list you supply.
Exporting and acting on the results
A check is only useful if it turns into a fix. Once a batch finishes:
- Export to CSV to attach a clean report to a client update or paste the failures into your issue tracker.
- Save favorites (up to 200 on the free tier) so re-running the same list after a fix is one click.
- Diff runs — keep last week's CSV and compare, so you can prove the 404s you flagged are now 301s or 200s.
- Automate it when the list matters enough to watch continuously: a paid plan re-runs your monitored URLs on a schedule and alerts you when a status changes, so a page that silently starts returning
500reaches you before your users do.
Check up to 100 URLs at once — free
Paste your list, get every HTTP status code in one table, and export to CSV. No signup. Upgrade to scheduled monitoring when you want it to run on its own.
Open the bulk checker → See monitoring plans