Fix library · Technical

Pages on your site that do not load

A broken page costs you twice. A visitor who came for something specific hits a dead end and usually leaves the site rather than hunting for the right page, and a search engine spends part of its limited attention on an address that returns nothing. Both are avoidable, and the fix is nearly always a redirect.

Technical Critical at worst 1 finding covered

Critical

Pages returning an error or not found

What SEOPert detected

One or more pages returned an error status instead of loading.

What this means

Some pages on your site are broken (errors or “not found”). Visitors hit dead ends and search engines waste time on them.

How to fix it

Open each listed address. If the page moved, set up a redirect from the old address to the new one. If it should exist, restore it.
Update any menu or page links that point to the broken addresses.

On WordPress

Use a redirection plugin to redirect moved or deleted pages to the right new page.
Fix menus under Appearance → Menus and edit pages that link to the broken addresses.

On Shopify

Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects: redirect old addresses to new ones. Update menu links.

On Wix

Use the Wix URL Redirect Manager (in SEO settings) to redirect old addresses.

If you are handing this to a developer

Fix or 301-redirect the listed URLs returning 4xx/5xx; update internal links.

Check it worked. Open each listed address in a private browser window: it should load, or redirect to a working page.

Read the status codes from a crawl A 30-second exercise. One line is the problem — see whether you would catch it.

Guides

Guides that cover this

See which of these apply to you.

The free audit checks up to 10 pages and tells you exactly what it found, in the same plain language as these guides. No account, no card.