Broken external link

A link points at a page on another site, and when statac refresh last asked that site for the page, the answer showed the link is broken. A reader who follows it lands on an error.

What you’ll see

warning  Broken external link: `https://example.org/post-2/` answered 404 Not Found
  content/post-1.md, line 1
   1 │ Read [Post 2](https://example.org/post-2/) next.
     │               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  `statac refresh` checked it 3 days ago. Change or remove the link.
  More: https://statac.dev/e/broken-external-link/

Why Statac warns

A build never uses the network, so statac check can’t ask another site about a link. If statac.yaml has check_external_links: true, each statac refresh asks the sites your pages link to about the links that are due, and records each answer, with the day, in fetched/links. statac check then reads that record.

A link is broken when the other site answers 404 Not Found or 410 Gone, when no site has the host’s name, or when the host’s certificate has expired or is for another host, so browsers show a warning in place of the page. Statac warns once for each place the link is written, even if several pages show it. If you wrote the link in your content, a field or a data file, the warning shows that line. If a template or snippet wrote it, the warning shows the line in the template.

Other answers don’t say whether the link works: a site that doesn’t answer in time, asks Statac to wait, refuses robots, or shows a page asking the visitor to prove they are a person. statac check counts those links without listing them.

How to fix it

Change the link to where the page is now, or remove it. If the page has gone for good, a copy in a web archive may be the best link to give.

If you keep the link on purpose, list its URL, or a URL above it, under unchecked_external_links in statac.yaml. statac refresh then doesn’t ask about it, and statac check counts it instead of warning.

The answer may be out of date: a site that was down may be back. A broken answer holds for a week, and the next statac refresh after that asks again.

Once you have understood the warning, you can quieten it by name.

Example

In content/post-1.md:

Read [Post 2](https://example.org/post-2/) next.

fetched/links, as statac refresh wrote it:

statac links 1
https://example.org/post-2/	404	2026-10-06

To stop checking every link to example.org, add this to statac.yaml:

unchecked_external_links:
  - https://example.org/

To stop Statac showing the warning, add this to statac.yaml:

quiet: [broken-external-link]

Its name

Name	broken-external-link
In the terminal	statac explain broken-external-link
To stop showing it	quiet: [broken-external-link] in statac.yaml, once you have understood it. Statac still counts it.