How To Find And Fix Broken Links On Your Website
Broken links are one of those issues that quietly chip away at your website's performance without making a huge amount of noise. They sit there, unnoticed by you but very much noticed by your visitors...
Broken links are one of those issues that quietly chip away at your website's performance without making a huge amount of noise. They sit there, unnoticed by you but very much noticed by your visitors and the search engines crawling your pages. If you are serious about search engine optimisation and want to give your site the best possible chance of performing well, then understanding how to find and fix broken links on your website is not optional, it is essential. The good news is that it is far more straightforward than most people assume, and the impact of getting it right is well worth the effort.
What Are Broken Links And Why Do They Matter?
A broken link is any hyperlink on your website that leads to a page or resource that no longer exists. When someone clicks on it, they land on a 404 error page instead of the content they were expecting. This can happen for a number of reasons: a page might have been deleted, a URL might have changed without a proper redirect being put in place, or an external website you linked to may have removed or restructured its content entirely.
From an onsite SEO perspective, broken links are a genuine problem. Search engines like Google crawl your site by following links from one page to the next. When they hit a dead end, it wastes crawl budget and signals that your site may not be well maintained. From a user experience point of view, landing on a 404 page is frustrating and can cause visitors to leave your site altogether. Both of these outcomes are bad for your rankings and your reputation.
How To Find Broken Links On Your Website
Before you can fix anything, you need to know where the problems are. There are several reliable approaches to identifying broken links, and using more than one method is always a sensible idea.
Use Google Search Console
If your site is connected to Google Search Console, this is your first port of call. Under the Pages section within the Indexing report, you will find a list of pages that Google has encountered errors on. Any 404 errors flagged here represent pages that either no longer exist or have broken internal links pointing to them. This is real data coming directly from Google's own crawl of your site, which makes it particularly valuable. You are not guessing at what might be broken, you are seeing exactly what Google has found.
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Crawl Your Site With A Dedicated Tool
For a more thorough audit, a dedicated crawling tool is the most efficient option. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is one of the most widely used tools in the industry for this purpose. It crawls your entire website in much the same way a search engine does, following every internal and external link it finds and reporting back on any that return an error. Once the crawl is complete, you can filter the results by status code and immediately see which URLs are returning a 404 or other error responses. The free version allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs, which is sufficient for smaller websites, whilst the paid version removes that limit entirely.
Check External Links Separately
External links, the ones pointing from your site to other websites, are often overlooked during a broken link audit. However, they matter too. If you are linking out to a resource that no longer exists, it reflects poorly on the quality of your content. Tools like Screaming Frog will flag these as well, so it is worth reviewing external link errors as part of the same audit process rather than treating them as a separate task.
How To Fix Broken Links Properly
Finding broken links is only half the job. Fixing them correctly is where the real SEO and user experience benefit lies.
Update Or Remove Internal Links
If a broken internal link is pointing to a page that has been moved or renamed, the simplest fix is to update the link to point to the correct URL. If the page no longer exists and there is no suitable replacement, removing the link entirely is the right call. Leaving a link in place that leads nowhere serves no purpose and only creates a poor experience for anyone clicking on it.
Implement 301 Redirects
If a page on your website has been moved or its URL has changed, a 301 redirect is the correct solution. A 301 tells both users and search engines that the page has permanently moved to a new location. Any link equity that was associated with the old URL passes through to the new one, which means you are not losing the SEO value that page had built up over time. If you are running a WordPress site, plugins such as Redirection make setting up 301 redirects a relatively painless process. For non-WordPress sites, redirects are typically handled at the server level through your .htaccess file or hosting configuration.
Fix Or Replace Broken External Links
For external links that are returning errors, you have a couple of options. If the content you were linking to has simply moved, update the link to the new URL. If it has disappeared entirely, either remove the link or find an alternative authoritative source that covers the same topic. Linking out to relevant, high-quality external resources is a positive signal for onsite SEO, but only when those links actually work and lead somewhere worthwhile.
Make Broken Link Audits A Regular Habit
One of the most common mistakes website owners make is treating a broken link audit as a one-time task. Websites evolve constantly. Pages get deleted, content gets restructured, external sites change their URLs or shut down altogether. A site that was completely free of broken links six months ago may have accumulated a handful since then without anyone noticing.
Building a regular audit into your website maintenance schedule, whether that is quarterly or every six months depending on the size of your site, ensures that broken links do not have the chance to quietly accumulate and drag down your SEO performance. It is a small investment of time that pays dividends in both rankings and user experience.
Putting It All Together
Broken links are a straightforward but genuinely impactful issue that affects websites of every size and type. They undermine the user experience, signal poor site quality to search engines, and can quietly erode the SEO work you have invested time and money into. By using tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog to identify problem URLs, and then addressing them through updated links, removed references, or properly implemented 301 redirects, you are taking meaningful steps to protect and improve your site's performance. The process does not have to be complicated, but it does need to be done consistently. Get into the habit of auditing your site regularly and you will stay ahead of the problem before it has any real chance to take hold.
Ian
Ian has worked in Digital Marketing for decades, and is a Google Partner for Google Ads and an expert in onsite and technical SEO. He has worked with hundreds of clients, helping them achieve success online, through SEO, PPC and Digital Marketing, working with local businesses through to national retailers.
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