How to Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Website

Why Broken Links Hurt Your Website

Broken links are hyperlinks on your website that lead to pages that no longer exist, returning a 404 Not Found error or another error status. They are one of the most common yet overlooked issues that affect both search engine optimization and ad network approval. While a single broken link may seem harmless, broken links accumulate over time and create compounding problems that can significantly damage your site's reputation with search engines, ad networks, and visitors.

From an SEO perspective, broken links waste crawl budget. Search engine crawlers allocate a limited number of requests to each website during each crawl session. When crawlers follow broken links, they waste requests on dead-end pages instead of discovering and indexing your actual content. For larger sites with hundreds of pages, excessive broken links can prevent search engines from discovering and ranking your newest content.

Broken links also disrupt the flow of link equity, sometimes called link juice, through your site. Internal links pass ranking authority from one page to another, helping your most important content rank higher. When an internal link points to a deleted page, that link equity disappears into a dead end. External backlinks pointing to pages that no longer exist waste valuable authority that other sites have given you.

For ad network approval, broken links signal neglect. When ad network reviewers encounter broken links on your site, it tells them that the site is not actively maintained. Ad networks want to partner with publishers who invest in their sites and provide a quality user experience. A site riddled with 404 errors suggests that the publisher may not maintain their ad implementation properly either, which is a concern for networks responsible for advertiser satisfaction.

User experience suffers directly from broken links. Visitors who click a link expecting to find relevant content and instead land on an error page lose trust in your site. They are less likely to click other links, explore more pages, or return in the future. Each broken link experience increases the probability that a visitor leaves your site permanently, taking their potential ad impressions with them.

Common Causes of Broken Links

Understanding why broken links occur helps you prevent them in the future. Most broken links fall into a few common categories that are largely preventable with good content management practices.

Deleted or Moved Content

The most common cause of broken internal links is deleting or restructuring content without updating links that point to it. When you delete an old article, every internal link to that article from other pages becomes broken. When you change your URL structure, such as moving from a date-based to a category-based permalink format, every old URL becomes broken unless you set up redirects.

CMS migrations are particularly problematic. Moving from one platform to another often changes URL structures, causing all existing internal and external links to break. WordPress to WordPress migrations usually preserve URLs, but migrations between different platforms like WordPress to Ghost, Squarespace, or a custom solution almost always require redirect mapping.

External Link Decay

Links to external websites break when those sites restructure, delete content, or go offline entirely. Studies have found that approximately 25 percent of web pages become unavailable within 10 years, a phenomenon known as link rot. For publishers who link to external resources, reference articles, and source material, external link decay is an ongoing maintenance challenge.

E-commerce product links are especially volatile. Affiliate links to specific products on Amazon, retailer sites, or brand websites frequently break when products are discontinued, listings are reorganized, or affiliate programs change their URL structures. Product review and comparison sites must regularly audit their outbound product links.

Typographical Errors

Simple typos in URLs create broken links from the moment they are published. A missing character, an extra slash, a misspelled directory name, or an incorrect file extension all produce links that were never valid. These errors are easy to prevent with careful proofreading but easy to miss in the rush of publishing.

URL Encoding Issues

Special characters in URLs including spaces, accented characters, and symbols must be properly encoded to work correctly. A URL containing a space will break in some contexts even if it works in others. CMS platforms usually handle encoding automatically, but manually constructed URLs, links in HTML emails, and links in document exports may have encoding problems.

Finding Broken Links

Browser Extensions

Browser extensions provide the quickest way to check individual pages for broken links. Extensions like Check My Links for Chrome and Link Checker for Firefox scan the current page and highlight broken links in red. These tools are ideal for quick checks of important pages like your homepage, top-performing articles, and pages you plan to submit in ad network applications.

The limitation of browser extensions is that they only check one page at a time. For a comprehensive site-wide audit, you need a crawling tool that follows links across your entire site. However, browser extensions are excellent for spot-checking pages after making content changes or before publishing new articles.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog is the gold standard for comprehensive site crawling and broken link detection. The desktop application crawls your entire website, following every internal link, and reports all URLs that return error status codes. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs, which is sufficient for small to medium publisher sites. The paid version removes the URL limit and adds advanced features.

To find broken links with Screaming Frog, enter your website URL and start the crawl. After the crawl completes, filter the results by status code to find all 404 errors. The tool shows you not only which URLs are broken but also which pages contain links to those broken URLs, making it easy to locate and fix each broken link.

Screaming Frog also identifies redirect chains, where a link points to a URL that redirects to another URL that redirects again. While not technically broken, redirect chains slow down page loads and dilute link equity. Ideally, every link should point directly to the final destination URL with at most one redirect.

Ahrefs and SEMrush

Enterprise SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush include comprehensive site audit features that detect broken links alongside other SEO issues. These tools crawl your site regularly and maintain a history of issues, making it easy to track whether broken links are being fixed or accumulating over time.

Ahrefs' Site Audit tool is particularly useful because it prioritizes issues by impact. Not all broken links are equally important. A broken link on your homepage that receives thousands of monthly visits needs immediate attention, while a broken link on a low-traffic archive page is less urgent. Ahrefs helps you focus your repair efforts where they have the most impact.

These tools also detect broken external backlinks, which are links from other websites that point to deleted pages on your site. Broken backlinks represent lost SEO value because other sites have linked to you but the link equity is wasted on a 404 page. Identifying these broken backlinks lets you set up redirects to capture their value.

WordPress Plugins

For WordPress publishers, dedicated broken link plugins provide automated ongoing monitoring. The Broken Link Checker plugin scans your content for broken internal and external links and reports them in your WordPress dashboard. It can also monitor links in comments, custom fields, and other content types.

WP Link Status Pro is a premium alternative that provides more reliable scanning with lower server impact. It checks links on a schedule you define and sends email notifications when broken links are detected. For publishers with large content libraries, automated monitoring ensures that broken links are caught quickly before they accumulate.

Google Search Console provides free broken link monitoring for all websites. The Coverage report shows pages that return 404 errors, and the Links report shows internal links pointing to those error pages. Since Search Console data comes directly from Google's crawler, it reflects exactly what Google sees when evaluating your site.

Fixing Strategies

Update the Link

The simplest fix for a broken link is to update it with a correct URL. If the linked content has moved to a new URL, update the link to point to the new location. If the content was restructured into a different page, link to the relevant section of the new page. If a product link expired, find the current product URL and update the link.

For WordPress sites, use the Search and Replace plugin or the Better Search Replace plugin to perform site-wide URL updates. If a broken URL appears in multiple articles, a single search-and-replace operation can fix all instances at once. Always back up your database before performing bulk search-and-replace operations.

Replace with Alternative Content

When the original linked resource is permanently gone with no replacement, find an alternative resource that serves the same purpose. If you linked to a study that has been taken down, find another study on the same topic. If a tool you recommended no longer exists, recommend a current alternative. Update the surrounding text to reference the new resource appropriately.

Remove the Link

Sometimes the best solution is to simply remove the broken link. If the linked content is no longer relevant to your article, remove the link and the surrounding context that references it. This is particularly appropriate for links to temporary resources like event pages, promotional offers, or news stories that are no longer available.

Set Up Redirects

When you delete or move content on your own site, set up 301 permanent redirects from the old URLs to appropriate replacement pages. This preserves link equity from external backlinks, prevents visitors from encountering 404 errors, and signals to search engines that the content has moved rather than disappeared.

Redirect deleted pages to the most relevant existing page on your site. If you deleted an article about a specific camera model, redirect its URL to your general camera reviews page or your most recent camera review. Avoid redirecting all deleted pages to your homepage, which is called a soft 404 and provides no value to visitors or search engines.

For WordPress, use the Redirection plugin to manage redirects through an intuitive interface. For other platforms, implement redirects in your server configuration files like .htaccess for Apache or nginx.conf for Nginx. Cloudflare users can set up redirect rules in the dashboard without modifying server configuration.

Prevention and Regular Monitoring

Preventing broken links is more efficient than fixing them after they occur. Establish content management practices that minimize the creation of broken links and catch new ones quickly.

Before deleting any page, check for internal links pointing to it. Use your CMS's link tracking features or run a quick search for the page URL across your content. Update or remove all internal links before deleting the page, and set up a redirect from the deleted URL to a relevant replacement.

When changing your URL structure, create a comprehensive redirect map that covers every affected URL. Test redirects after implementation by visiting old URLs and confirming they lead to the correct new pages. Monitor Google Search Console for crawl errors in the weeks following a URL structure change.

Establish a regular broken link audit schedule. For actively maintained publisher sites, a monthly automated check with a plugin or tool like Screaming Frog catches most issues before they compound. Quarterly comprehensive audits that include external link checking help manage link rot in your outbound links.

Use relative URLs for internal links when possible. Relative URLs like /category/article-name are more resilient to domain changes, protocol changes, and subdomain changes than absolute URLs like https://www.example.com/category/article-name. Most CMS platforms support relative URL generation for internal links.

Create a custom 404 error page that helps visitors find what they were looking for. A good 404 page includes a search bar, links to popular content categories, and a link to the homepage. This reduces bounce rates from visitors who do encounter broken links by giving them a path to continue browsing your site.

Monitor your site's link health as part of your overall ad network readiness assessment. AdGateScore checks for broken links alongside dozens of other factors that ad networks evaluate during their approval process, helping you maintain a clean, professional site that meets every network's standards.