How to find and fix broken links
How to find broken links on a website, understand the status codes, fix or redirect them and stop them coming back, so visitors and search engines never hit a dead end.
Broken links are small problems that add up. Each one wastes a visitor’s trip, dents trust and leaks a bit of SEO value, and they accumulate quietly as the pages you link to move or disappear. Here is how to find them, fix them and keep them from coming back.
What counts as a broken link
A broken link points at something that no longer loads. The clue is the HTTP status code the URL returns:
- 404 Not found. The page is gone or the URL is wrong. The most common broken link.
- 500 and other 5xx. The server errored. The page may exist but is failing.
- A request that fails entirely. The host did not respond, timed out or refused the connection.
Redirects, 301 and 302, are not broken, but a long chain of them is its own problem: it slows the page and leaks link value at each hop. The HTTP status checker shows the full chain for a URL so you can spot that.
How to find them
- Check a single page. The free broken link checker fetches a page, pulls out its links and shows the status each one returns. Good for a quick look at an important page.
- Crawl the whole site. A crawler walks every page and reports broken links across the site. This is the thorough option for a full audit or after a migration.
- Watch over time. Outbound links break on someone else’s schedule, so a one-off check goes stale. Continuous monitoring catches new breaks as they happen.
How to fix them
Once you have a list, fix each by type:
- Internal link to a page you moved. Update the link to the new URL, or add a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one so old links and bookmarks still work.
- Internal link to a page that is gone for good. Remove the link, or point it at the closest relevant page. Do not leave it pointing at a 404.
- Outbound link to an external page that has moved. Update it to the new location, or to an archived copy if the content is worth keeping.
- Outbound link to a page that no longer exists. Unlink it or replace it with a working source.
Prefer a 301 over a 302 for anything permanent, because a 301 passes ranking signals and is cached by browsers.
Stop them coming back
Links break continuously, so fixing them once is not enough. The two things that keep them from piling up are a redirect map that survives migrations and ongoing monitoring that flags new breaks before a visitor finds them.
On a client site, a broken link the client spots first looks careless. Found by you first, it is just routine maintenance, and it is the kind of small win worth showing in a monthly report.
Janitor crawls the sites you manage, flags broken links and server errors across the SEO and discoverability category, and puts them in a branded report, alongside robots and sitemap checks and the rest.