Broken links on your website
A broken link is a link that goes nowhere. The visitor clicks it and lands on a page that does not exist, usually a 404 error page. Broken links happen on every website over time as pages get moved, renamed, or deleted, and as external sites you have linked to change their URLs or go offline. They matter for two reasons. First, they create a poor experience for visitors who expect a link to take them somewhere useful. Second, Google treats a site with many broken links as one that is poorly maintained, which can work against your search rankings over time. The good news is that finding and fixing broken links is one of the more straightforward maintenance tasks on a website, and there are free tools that do most of the work for you.
Why broken links happen
Understanding why links break makes it easier to prevent them from building up in the first place.
The most common cause is changing a page URL after the page has already been published. When you rename a URL slug in your website builder, any existing links pointing to the old URL instantly become broken, both links from other pages on your site and links from external websites. This is one of the reasons SEO best practice is to get your URL structure right before publishing and change URLs as rarely as possible afterward.
The second most common cause is deleting a page without setting up a redirect from the old URL to a relevant replacement. If visitors or Google try to reach that URL and find nothing there, they get a 404 error. The page is gone but the links pointing to it from other pages or other websites do not disappear automatically.
External links break for different reasons. The site you linked to may have restructured its URLs, moved content to a different domain, or shut down entirely. This is completely outside your control but it still affects the experience of anyone following that link from your site. A resource page or blog with many outbound links to other websites will accumulate broken external links over time simply because the web changes.
Broken links can also result from simple human error: a typo in a URL when you added the link manually, linking to a page that was never published, or copying and pasting a URL that had extra characters or spaces that made it invalid.
What broken links do to your site
Visitor experience. A visitor who clicks a link expecting to find useful information and lands on a 404 page is likely to leave your site entirely. If that happens on a page where you want them to take action, like contacting you or reading more about your services, a single broken link can directly cost you a conversion. Visitors have no way of knowing whether the broken link was a one-off mistake or a sign that the whole site is unreliable, so many will simply leave rather than investigate further.
Crawl budget. When Google crawls your site, it follows links to discover and revisit pages. Every time Google follows a link and finds a 404, it wastes a portion of the crawl budget it allocated to your site on a dead end. For smaller sites this is unlikely to be catastrophic, but a high volume of broken links signals to Google that the site is not being maintained, which can affect how often Google comes back to crawl it and how much trust it extends to your content.
Link equity. When external websites link to a page on your site and that page no longer exists, any SEO value those links carry does not go anywhere useful. Setting up a 301 redirect from the dead URL to a relevant replacement recovers that value. Without the redirect it is simply lost.
Search Console errors. Google Search Console flags 404 errors in its Pages report. A growing list of 404 errors in Search Console is a sign that broken links are accumulating and need attention.
How to find broken links on your site
Google Search Console
If you have Google Search Console connected to your site, this is the first place to check. Go to Indexing in the left menu and click Pages. Look for pages with a Not Found status, which means Google tried to crawl a URL on your site and received a 404 response. This report tells you which URLs are broken but it does not always tell you where the link to that URL lives on your site.
To find the source of a broken link, use the URL Inspection tool at the top of Search Console. Enter the broken URL and look at the referring pages section, which shows you which pages on your site link to that URL. You can then go directly to those pages and either update or remove the link.
Search Console is particularly useful for catching broken links that came from other websites linking to pages you have deleted or moved, since those links will not show up in an on-site crawl.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a desktop crawl tool that works exactly the way Google’s crawler does. It follows every link on your site, checks the status of every URL it finds, and reports back with a complete picture of what is working and what is not. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs, which is enough for most smaller sites. You can download it at screamingfrog.co.uk.
To use it, open the tool, enter your domain in the search bar, and click Start. Once the crawl finishes, go to the Response Codes tab at the top and filter by Client Error 4xx. This shows you every URL on your site that returned a 404 or similar error, along with the page on your site where the broken link was found. The In Links tab at the bottom of the screen shows you exactly which page contains the broken link and where on that page it appears.
Screaming Frog is the most thorough free option for finding broken links because it replicates what Google sees when it crawls your site.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
Ahrefs offers a free version of its webmaster tools that you can connect to your site by verifying ownership, similar to the process for Google Search Console. Once connected, it shows you broken internal links and broken external links separately, along with the pages they appear on. It also shows broken backlinks, meaning links from other websites pointing to pages on your site that no longer exist, which Search Console and Screaming Frog do not cover as clearly. This makes it a useful complement to the other tools.
Browser extensions
For a quick check on a specific page rather than a full site crawl, browser extensions like Check My Links for Chrome let you scan the page you are currently viewing and highlight any broken links in red. This is useful if you want to quickly verify a specific page before publishing it or after making edits, but it is not a substitute for a full site crawl when you want to audit the whole site.
Types of broken links and how to think about each one
Internal broken links are links from one page on your site to another page on your site that no longer exists or has moved to a different URL. These are entirely within your control and should always be fixed, either by updating the link to the correct current URL or by setting up a redirect from the old URL to the appropriate replacement.
External broken links are links from your site to a page on another website that has moved or been deleted. These are outside your control but still affect your visitors. When you find them, either update the link to a working equivalent source, replace it with a different source that covers the same information, or remove the link if there is no suitable replacement.
Broken backlinks are links from other websites pointing to pages on your site that no longer exist. You cannot change what other sites link to, but you can set up 301 redirects from the dead URLs on your site to relevant live pages. This recovers any SEO value those external links carry and ensures visitors following those links land somewhere useful rather than on a 404 page.
Redirect chains are not broken links in the strict sense but they are worth addressing at the same time. A redirect chain is when URL A redirects to URL B, which redirects to URL C. Google and other crawlers follow these chains but each hop loses a small amount of the SEO value being passed through the redirect. Screaming Frog flags redirect chains in its Redirect Chains report. The fix is to update the original link or redirect to point directly to the final destination URL, skipping the intermediate steps.
How to fix broken links
Update the link directly
The cleanest fix for an internal broken link is to go to the page containing the link and update it to point to the correct current URL. If a page moved from /old-url/ to /new-url/, find every internal link pointing to /old-url/ and change them to /new-url/. Screaming Frog’s In Links report makes this straightforward by showing you exactly which pages contain each broken link.
Set up a 301 redirect
When a page has been deleted or permanently moved and you cannot update every link pointing to it, a 301 redirect tells both visitors and Google that the page has permanently moved to a new location. Visitors are automatically taken to the new page without seeing a 404, and Google transfers most of the SEO value from the old URL to the new one.
How you set up a 301 redirect depends on your platform. On WordPress, a plugin like Redirection handles this through a simple interface where you enter the old URL and the destination URL. On Webflow, go to Project Settings and then the Publishing tab, where there is a 301 Redirects section. Wix Studio has a URL Redirect Manager under Marketing and SEO in the dashboard. Squarespace has a URL Redirects option under Advanced in the pages panel. Framer handles redirects in the Site Settings under Redirects.
When setting up redirects, always point to the most relevant live page you have. If the deleted page was about a specific service, redirect to the current version of that service page. If the page has no direct equivalent, redirect to the closest relevant category page or to your homepage as a last resort. A redirect to a relevant page is significantly more useful to both visitors and Google than leaving the URL as a 404.
Remove the link
If an external link points to a page that no longer exists and you cannot find a suitable replacement, remove the link from your content. A sentence that previously linked out to a dead resource can stand on its own without the link. This is preferable to leaving a broken link in place for visitors to click on.
Replace with an alternative source
If you linked to an external resource because it provided useful supporting information, search for an equivalent page on a different site and update the link to point there instead. This is a better outcome than simply removing the link, since it preserves the usefulness of that section of your content for readers.
How to prevent broken links from building up
The most effective prevention measure is to set up a 301 redirect immediately any time you change a URL or delete a page. Many people change URL slugs or delete old pages without thinking about the links pointing to those URLs, and the broken links accumulate silently until someone runs a crawl and discovers dozens of 404 errors.
Make it a habit to run a broken link check every three to six months. For most smaller sites, a Screaming Frog crawl takes less than ten minutes and immediately shows you anything that needs attention. If your site has a lot of outbound links to external sources, external broken links will accumulate faster and may be worth checking more frequently.
Before any significant site restructure, such as changing your URL structure, migrating to a new platform, or doing a large content audit that involves deleting old pages, run a full broken link check first so you have a complete picture of the existing link structure. Then run another check immediately after the restructure to catch anything that broke in the process.
If you are using WordPress, the Redirection plugin can be configured to automatically detect 404 errors as they occur and log them for you to review, which means broken links get flagged as soon as someone hits them rather than waiting for your next scheduled audit.
How broken links relate to your overall site health
Broken links are one signal among many that Google uses to assess the quality and maintenance of a site. A site with a small number of broken links that are fixed promptly is not going to be meaningfully penalised. A site with hundreds of broken links that have been accumulating for years is giving Google a consistent signal that the site is neglected, and that works against rankings across the board.
Fixing broken links also tends to surface other issues. When you run a full crawl with Screaming Frog you will often find redirect chains, pages with missing titles, images with no alt text, and other technical issues alongside the broken links. Treating a broken link audit as part of a broader quarterly technical health check is a more efficient approach than running separate checks for each issue.