How to find and fix broken links on your website

Nobody finds a broken link by browsing their own site. You click your own menu, you go to the pages you maintain, and everything works. Broken links live in the places you never open: an old blog post linking to a service you renamed, a footer pointing at a supplier who moved, a PDF somebody deleted in 2023.

You find them by crawling, or you find out from the customer who gave up.

Two kinds, and only one is fully your problem

Internal links point from one page of your site to another. When these break it is entirely within your control, it is always worth fixing, and it is usually caused by renaming or deleting a page without redirecting the old address.

External links point at somebody else's site. These break because that site changed, which you cannot prevent. They are worth auditing perhaps once a year, and the fix is to update or remove the link rather than to chase the other site.

Prioritise internal ones. They affect how visitors move through your site and how thoroughly search engines can crawl it.

Three ways to find them

Google Search Console — free, and already watching

Under Pages, look at the excluded reasons for "Not found (404)". This lists addresses Google has tried and failed to fetch, which means every one of them is either linked from somewhere or was indexed previously. It is the highest-value list because these are the broken pages Google already knows about.

The limitation: Search Console only reports what Google has crawled. A broken link on a page Google has not visited recently will not appear.

Crawl the site

A crawler starts at your homepage, follows every link, and records the status of each address. This is the only method that finds everything, and it is what an audit tool is doing when it reports pages that do not load. Screaming Frog's free tier covers 500 URLs as a desktop application; the free SEOPert audit covers ten pages, which is enough to reveal a pattern but not a whole catalogue.

Your server's own error log

Often overlooked and genuinely useful. Your hosting control panel has a log of requests that returned 404. Unlike the other two methods, this shows addresses real people requested — which is a better signal of what to fix first than anything a crawler produces.

Deciding what to do with each one

There are only three answers, and picking the right one takes a few seconds per link.

1. The page moved. Redirect the old address to the new one, permanently. This keeps anyone arriving from an old link or an old search result, and it passes the page's accumulated credit to the new address.
2. The page should still exist. Restore it. This usually means somebody deleted or unpublished it by accident.
3. The page is genuinely gone and has no successor. Leave it returning 404 and remove the links pointing at it. This is correct and healthy — a 404 for something that no longer exists is the honest answer.

The common mistake is redirecting everything to the homepage. Someone looking for your boiler repair page does not want your homepage; they want boiler repair or an explanation. A blanket homepage redirect converts a clear dead end into a confusing one.

Step-by-step fixes for pages that do not load, by platform →

Fixing the links themselves

A redirect rescues the visitor. It does not fix the link, and the broken link is still sitting in your content. Once the redirects are in place, go back and update the actual links — in menus, in body text, in the footer — so the site stops relying on them.

While you are there, make internal links relative to your own site and consistent about https and trailing slashes. Inconsistency here quietly creates duplicate address problems that look unrelated when they surface months later.

Stopping it happening again

Most broken internal links are created by one action: renaming or deleting a page. Three habits prevent nearly all of them.

• When you rename a page's address, set up the redirect in the same sitting. Not later.
• Before deleting a page, search your own site for links to it.
• After any redesign or migration, crawl the site. Migrations break links in volume, and the damage is invisible from the front page.

And check periodically rather than never. A site that is edited monthly accumulates these faster than anyone expects — keeping your sitemap current helps search engines notice the corrections quickly.