Broken links send your visitors to pages that no longer exist, usually showing a "page not found" error. They frustrate visitors, waste the time search engines spend crawling your site, and can quietly chip away at your SEO rankings. Checking for them now and then, especially after you redesign your site or move pages around, is a quick habit that saves you bigger headaches later.
Why broken links are worth fixing
A broken link is any link, internal or external, that points to a page that no longer loads. It might be a typo in the URL, a page you deleted or renamed, or an external site that moved or shut down. Beyond the poor experience for your visitors, search engines treat a site full of dead links as lower quality, which can hurt how well your pages rank.
How to find broken links on your website
You don't need any special access to your hosting account to check for broken links. These methods work the same whether your site is on cPanel or DirectAdmin, since you're checking the live website itself, not the control panel.
Use a free online broken link checker
- Search for a free "broken link checker" tool online (several reputable ones let you scan a site for free up to a certain number of pages).
- Enter your website's full address, including https://, and start the scan.
- Wait for the tool to crawl your pages, it will list every link it found and flag the ones returning an error.
- Export or note down the list of broken links and the pages they appear on.
Check Google Search Console
If your site is already verified with Google Search Console, its Pages report (sometimes shown as "Coverage") lists URLs Google tried to crawl and couldn't reach. This tells you about broken links Google itself has run into, which is useful alongside a full site scan.
Check manually after big changes
Whenever you redesign a page, rename a page's URL, or remove old content, click through your own site's main menu, footer links, and any blog posts that link to that page. This catches obvious breaks immediately, before a scan would even run.
How to fix a broken link
- Open the page containing the broken link in your website's editor (for example, your WordPress editor or the page builder you used to build the site).
- Find the broken link in the page content and check the destination address for typos.
- If the destination page still exists under a different address, update the link to point to the correct, current URL.
- If the page is gone for good, either remove the link or point it to the next most relevant page on your site instead.
- If many old URLs now lead to broken links because you restructured your site, set up redirects from the old addresses to the new ones instead of editing every single link by hand.
If you're not sure how to set up a redirect from an old URL to a new one, see How to Create SEO-Friendly URLs and Set Up Page Redirects.
Keeping it from happening again
- Avoid changing a page's URL once it's live and already linked to elsewhere, unless you also set up a redirect.
- Run a broken link scan every few months, and always right after a site redesign or a bulk content cleanup.
- When linking to other websites, prefer pages that are unlikely to move, such as an organization's main homepage, over deep links that change often.