How to Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Website

Why broken links are worth taking seriously

A broken link — one pointing to a page that no longer exists, returns an error, or was never a valid URL in the first place — seems like a small, cosmetic annoyance. In practice it's more consequential than it looks: it's a genuinely poor experience for any visitor who clicks it expecting real content, a wasted opportunity for a crawler that could have spent that same request discovering an actual, working page instead, and on a large enough site, a real, visible signal of neglect that can affect how the whole site is perceived, not just the one broken link itself.

The two genuinely different kinds worth distinguishing

Internal broken links — a link on a site pointing to another page on that same site that no longer exists or was mistyped. Entirely within a site's own control to find and fix directly.

External broken links — a link pointing out to another site's page, which has since moved, changed its URL, or been taken down entirely, all completely outside the linking site's control. Still worth finding and fixing, but the fix looks different — replacing or removing the link rather than correcting an internal path.

What actually causes broken links to accumulate over time

Pages get deleted or restructured without anyone updating the other pages that were linking to the old URL. Content gets migrated to a new CMS or platform with a different URL structure, and old internal links throughout the site never get updated to match. Sites being linked to externally redesign or reorganize their own content, breaking a link that was completely valid and correct at the time it was originally added. None of these happen because anyone made a mistake in the moment — they accumulate naturally as both a site and the wider web around it keep changing over time.

Why this compounds specifically on older, larger sites

A five-page site created last month has had essentially no time to accumulate broken links. A five-year-old site with hundreds of pages, several past redesigns, and countless links out to other sites across its history has had substantially more opportunity for individual links to quietly break, one at a time, without anyone specifically noticing any single one as it happened. This is a big part of why a genuine site-wide link audit tends to become more valuable, not less, the older and larger a site actually gets.

The real, concrete cost of leaving these unaddressed

Visitor frustration and lost trust. Clicking a link and landing on a 404 is a jarring, negative moment in an otherwise normal browsing experience — and enough of these moments across a site can genuinely erode trust in the site as a whole, not just in that one specific broken link.

Wasted crawl budget. Every broken link a crawler follows is a request spent on a dead end instead of on discovering or re-evaluating a real, working page — a bigger practical concern the larger a site is and the more finite its crawl budget genuinely is.

Lost internal link equity. A broken internal link that would have passed some authority to another page on the site accomplishes nothing at all once it's broken — that potential value is simply lost rather than transferred anywhere.

A visible, cumulative signal of poor maintenance. A handful of broken links scattered across a huge site rarely matters much on their own. Dozens or hundreds of them is a different story — a real, visible pattern suggesting a site that isn't being actively maintained, which can color how the entire site is perceived, not just the specific broken pages.

How to actually find them across an entire site

Checking links manually, page by page, doesn't scale past a genuinely tiny site — a real, systematic crawl is what actually finds every broken link across an entire site in one pass, reporting the exact source page, the exact broken URL, and the specific error encountered for each one, rather than requiring someone to click through every single link on every single page by hand.

How to actually fix what gets found

For internal links, update the link to point at the correct current URL, or set up a proper redirect from the old broken URL if it's likely other things — an external site, someone's old bookmark — might still be linking to it too. For external links, either update to the resource's current correct URL if it still genuinely exists somewhere, or remove the link entirely and replace it with a comparable, currently-working alternative if the original resource is simply gone for good.