How to Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Website

A broken link points to a page that no longer exists. When someone clicks one, they get an error instead of content. The most common is a 404 Not Found, but you'll also encounter 410 Gone (permanently removed), 500 Internal Server Error (server-side failure), and timeout errors where the destination never responds.

Every website accumulates broken links over time. Pages get deleted, URLs change during a redesign, external sites shut down. The question is whether you catch them before your users and search engines do.

Why broken links matter

User experience

Hitting a 404 page breaks the user's flow. If they clicked a link expecting a product, a resource, or an answer, they're now stuck. Most won't try to find the right page — they'll leave. Studies consistently show that broken links erode trust, especially on sites where accuracy matters (e-commerce, SaaS, healthcare).

Crawl budget waste

Search engines allocate a finite number of requests per crawl session to your site. Every broken link Googlebot follows is a wasted request that could have been spent discovering or re-indexing actual content. On large sites with thousands of pages, this adds up.

Link equity loss

When an external site links to a page that returns a 404, the ranking value of that backlink is lost entirely. If a high-authority domain linked to a resource you deleted without redirecting, you're leaving free SEO value on the table.

How to find broken links

Manual checking

You could click every link on your site. This works if you have five pages. For anything larger, it's impractical and error-prone — you'll miss links buried in footers, sidebars, and old blog posts.

Automated crawling

A broken link checker crawls your site the same way a search engine would, following every internal and external link and recording the HTTP status code of each destination. This is the only reliable approach for sites with more than a handful of pages.

Look for a tool that checks both internal links (links between your own pages) and external links (links to other websites). Internal broken links are fully within your control. External broken links require you to either update the URL or remove the link.

How to fix broken links

Redirect the old URL

If the content moved to a new URL, set up a 301 redirect from the old path to the new one. This preserves link equity from backlinks, fixes the user experience immediately, and tells search engines to transfer ranking signals to the new page.

Update the link

If you control the page containing the broken link, update the href to the correct destination. This is the cleanest fix for internal links pointing to renamed pages.

Remove the link

If the destination no longer exists and there's no replacement, remove the link entirely. A dead link is worse than no link — it signals neglect to both users and search engines.

Preventing broken links

Set up regular monitoring — monthly at minimum, weekly for sites that publish frequently. Automated scans catch new broken links before they accumulate.

When restructuring URLs, create redirects as part of the migration. Keep a redirect map and implement it before the old URLs go live. Either relative or absolute URLs work for internal links — just be consistent. Always use absolute URLs in canonical tags and sitemaps.

Internal vs external broken links

Internal broken links are the higher priority. You control both the link and the destination, so every one is fixable. They also directly affect how search engines crawl and understand your site structure.

External broken links matter too, but they're someone else's problem to fix. Your options are limited to updating the link to a working URL, replacing it with an alternative resource, or removing it. Check external links quarterly — they break more often than you'd expect.