diff --git a/.travis.yml b/.travis.yml
index ad47d1b2a8a..5fe977de233 100644
--- a/.travis.yml
+++ b/.travis.yml
@@ -33,9 +33,20 @@ before_install:
   - chmod +x bazel-0.1.2-installer-linux-x86_64.sh
   - ./bazel-0.1.2-installer-linux-x86_64.sh --user
 
+before_script:
+  # required for building the website docs
+  - (cd website && npm install && npm install gulp && which gulp)
+  - wget -q https://github.com/spf13/hugo/releases/download/v0.15/hugo_0.15_amd64.deb
+  - sudo dpkg -i hugo*.deb
+  - hugo version
+  - pip install --user requests==2.9.0
+  - pip install --user LinkChecker
+  - linkchecker --version
+
 script:
   - which gcc-4.8
   - gcc --version
   - which g++-4.8
-  - g++ --version 
-  - scripts/travis/build.sh && scripts/travis/test.sh
+  - g++ --version
+  # TODO: change below from ; to && once all links are fixed so we fail build on bad ones
+  - (cd website && make site); scripts/travis/build.sh && scripts/travis/test.sh
diff --git a/website/Makefile b/website/Makefile
index 82454486ccc..115091acf56 100755
--- a/website/Makefile
+++ b/website/Makefile
@@ -1,6 +1,8 @@
 setup:
 	@brew list hugo || brew install hugo
 	@npm install
+	@which gulp || npm install gulp
+	@pip install linkchecker
 
 serve:
 	@hugo server --watch
diff --git a/website/README.md b/website/README.md
index 88b62d70ba4..57fe2ed9e75 100644
--- a/website/README.md
+++ b/website/README.md
@@ -13,6 +13,7 @@ Running the Heron documentation locally requires that you have the following ins
 * [Make](https://www.gnu.org/software/make/)
 * [Node.js](https://nodejs.org/en/)
 * [npm](https://www.npmjs.com/)
+* [pip](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip)
 
 ### OS X Setup
 
@@ -74,6 +75,19 @@ browser from the command line:
 $ open http://localhost:1313/heron
 ```
 
+## Checking Links
+
+To verify that the links in the docs are all valid, run `make linkchecker`, which will produce a
+report of broken links. If `linkchecker` fails to install or run properly, you can install it manually.
+Note that due to this [https://github.com/wummel/linkchecker/pull/657](issue), `linkchecker`
+versions 9.2 and 9.3 require the python `requests` >= 2.2.0 and < 2.10.0.
+
+```bash
+$ pip uninstall requests
+$ pip install requests==2.9.0
+$ pip install linkchecker
+```
+
 ## Publishing the Site
 
 The content on the [twitter.github.io/heron](http://twitter.github.io/heron) website is what is
diff --git a/website/linkchecker.sh b/website/linkchecker.sh
index e621ed95d1c..8e611791cd8 100755
--- a/website/linkchecker.sh
+++ b/website/linkchecker.sh
@@ -1,14 +1,26 @@
-#! bin/bash
+#!/bin/bash
+
+set -e
+
+function die {
+  echo $1 && exit 1
+}
 
 #linkchecker removes previous runs.
-pip install linkchecker
+which linkchecker || die 'Linkchecker must be installed to run this script. Exiting'
 rm -f linkchecker-errors.csv && rm -f linkchecker-out.csv
-linkchecker public/index.html --no-warnings -F csv 
+
+set +e
+linkchecker public/index.html --no-warnings -F csv
+STATUS=$?
+set -e
+
 #uses error code: on fail, write linkchecker-errors.csv for debugging
-if [[ $? == 1 ]]; then 
+if [[ $STATUS != 0 ]]; then
   cut -sd ';' -f 1,2 linkchecker-out.csv | tr ';' ' ' | \
   awk '{ print $2 " " $1}' | sort -u >> linkchecker-errors.csv;
-  echo "linkchecker failed - check linkchecker-errors.csv"; 
+  echo "linkchecker failed - check linkchecker-errors.csv";
+   exit $STATUS
 else
   echo "linkchecker passes"; 
 fi