How to Check and Fix Broken Links on Your Website

How to Check and Fix Broken Links on Your Website

We've all been there, right? You're deep in a Google search, you find what looks like the perfect article, you click the link... and... 404 Not Found. It’s like hitting a digital brick wall. It’s frustrating. It’s a dead end. You probably just hit the "back" button without even thinking about it, right? Well, that same frustrating experience could be happening to visitors on your website right now, and you might not even know it. This isn't just a minor annoyance; it's a genuine problem that can quietly sabotage your site's success. Let's be honest, it makes your site look a bit... neglected. And if it's frustrating for a user, you can bet it's also a problem for Google.

So, What's the Real Harm in a Few Dead Links?

It's easy to think, "Oh, it's just one or two broken links, what's the big deal?" But it's a bit like a "death by a thousand cuts" scenario, for two big reasons. The first is all about your visitors, the actual humans. Every time a user clicks a link on your site, they're trusting you to take them somewhere relevant. When that link leads to a 404 page, you've broken that trust. It’s a bad user experience. It makes people bounce. They leave your site frustrated, and they're less likely to come back or trust your other content. That's a visitor, and potentially a customer, lost. And all because of a simple link that went nowhere.

How Google's "Spiders" See Those 404s

The second part of the problem, and the one we SEO-minded folks get really concerned about, is Google. Google's little crawlers, or "spiders," navigate the entire internet by following links. That's how they discover your pages and figure out how everything is connected. When a crawler hits a broken link, it's a dead end for them, too. It wastes what we call "crawl budget" the limited amount of time and resources Google will dedicate to looking at your site. Even worse, if you have links from other websites pointing to a page on your site that is now dead, all that valuable "link juice" or "authority" is just... disappearing. It’s like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it.

Where Do These Annoying Broken Links Even Come From?

You might be thinking, "But I'm careful! How did I get broken links?" Well, these little digital gremlins pop up for all sorts of reasons, and they're a natural part of any website's life. The most common one? You changed a URL. Maybe you updated a blog post and changed its "slug" to be more SEO-friendly. But you forgot to update the five other internal links on your site that were still pointing to that old URL. Bam, 404. Or maybe you deleted a page or a post entirely because it was outdated, but links to it still exist. Another big one, and this isn't even your fault, is external links. You linked out to a really great resource on another website... and then that site deleted their page. Now, your link is broken.

The Hunt: How to Actually Find Them

Okay, so we're all on the same page: broken links are bad. They hurt users, they hurt your SEO. Now... how do you find them? If your site only has five pages, sure, you could click every single link manually. But who has time for that? And if your site has hundreds or thousands of pages? It's literally impossible. You can't just guess. You need a systematic way to scan your entire website and get a report of every single link that's hit a dead end. This isn't a job for a human; this is a job for a tool. Thankfully, we have some really, really good options available.

Meet Your New Best Friend: The Broken Link Checker

This is where a good Broken Link Checker tool becomes your new favorite thing. It's exactly what it sounds like. It’s an automated program or service that will "crawl" your entire website, just like Google's spiders do. It follows every single link it can find both your internal links (to other pages on your site) and your external links (to other websites). It then tests the "status" of each link. If it gets a "200 OK" (which means "everything's good!"), it moves on. But if it gets a "404 Not Found" or some other error code, it flags it and puts it on a list for you to review. It's like sending a little robot to check every door in your giant mansion and report back on which ones are locked.

Let's Talk Tools of the Trade

You've got a lot of choices here, so don't get overwhelmed. The first and most important one you should already be using is Google Search Console. It's 100% free, and inside, there's a "Coverage" report that will flat-out tell you about 404 errors it has found. This is your baseline. For more power, many of the big SEO suites like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz have "Site Audit" tools that do an incredibly deep dive and will give you a detailed report of all broken links. And if you're on WordPress, there are dedicated plugins that will scan your site in the background and even email you when they find a broken link. The point is, you don't have to do this manually.

Okay, I Ran a Tool and Have a Scary-Looking List... Now What?

So you did it. You ran a crawl. And... oh boy. The report is here, and it's 50 links long. Don't panic! This is the good part. Now you have a clear, actionable to-do list. The "unknown" is gone. Now we just fix them, one by one. The fix itself depends on what kind of link is broken. We can generally split this into two camps: fixing your internal links (the ones on your own site) and dealing with your external links (the ones pointing to other sites). Let's start with the easy ones: the internal links.

Fixing Your Internal Links: The Easy Wins

This is the stuff you have 100% control over. If your broken link report says a page on your site, seoroy.com/contact-me, is linking to seoroy.com/about-uss (with a typo), the fix is obvious. You just log in to your site, go to the "Contact Me" page, and edit the link to point to the correct /about-us page. Easy. But what if the page it's linking to is just... gone? What if you deleted your /old-service page and replaced it with a new, better /new-service-plus page? You don't want to just delete the link, especially if other sites are linking to that old page. This is where we use a little bit of SEO magic.

The Magic of the 301 Redirect

This is your single most powerful tool for fixing broken links. A "301 Redirect" is just a permanent "change of address" form for the internet. It's a command you give to your server that says, "Hey, whenever anyone (a user or a Googlebot) tries to visit this old, dead URL, don't show them a 404. Instead, automatically and instantly send them to this new, awesome, relevant URL." This solves everything. The user isn't frustrated, they're on the right page. And Google? It understands the command and, even better, it passes most of all that valuable "link juice" from the old URL over to the new one. It's the ultimate win-win.

What About Those External Broken Links?

This is the other section of your report. These are links on your site that point out to other websites that are now dead. This is a quality signal, too. You don't want to be that person who keeps recommending restaurants that have been closed for five years. You've got three main choices here. First, you can just remove the link. If it was just a small citation and the resource is gone, just delete the link text. Problem solved. Second, and this is the best option, you can replace the link. Go find a new, high-quality, up-to-date article or resource that says the same thing, and just... swap the link. This keeps your content helpful and current. Third, you could try to contact the other site owner... but let's be honest, that's usually way more work than it's worth.

This Isn't a "One and Done" Job

You did it. You cleared out your whole list. Your site is pristine. You're done... right? Well, for now. The internet is a living, breathing, constantly changing thing. Pages you linked to today might be gone next month. You might get sloppy and make a typo in a new post. This is why you can't just "set it and forget it." This kind of link maintenance is just part of good website "housekeeping." You should plan to run a check for broken links at least once a quarter, or maybe once a month if your site is really large. It's like weeding a garden. It's not a one-time project, it's a small, regular bit of maintenance that keeps the whole thing healthy and beautiful.

A Clean Site is a Happy, Trustworthy Site

At the end of the day, all this work comes down to one thing: trust. A user trusts that your links will take them somewhere useful. Google trusts that you're maintaining a high-quality, helpful website that isn't full of dead ends and digital cobwebs. Regularly checking and fixing your broken links is one of the easiest and most concrete ways to build and maintain that trust. It shows you care about your user's experience, and it shows Google that you're a serious, authoritative site owner. And that, right there, is a massive, and often overlooked, part of the entire SEO puzzle.