Broken links are links that point to a page that no longer loads. To find them, run a free link crawler across your whole site and check the coverage report in Google Search Console. Then fix each one at the source: update the link if the page simply moved, set a permanent redirect if the address changed for good, and remove or replace the link if the destination is gone. A full site scan takes minutes, and a free check at healthypage.help/check will show you how many your visitors are hitting right now.
Broken links are the quietest problem a website has. Nothing crashes. No alert arrives in your inbox. A visitor clicks something that looks perfectly normal, lands on an error page, and leaves without ever telling you what happened. Multiply that by a few hundred visits a month and you have a slow leak that never shows up in a revenue report as a cause, only as a shortfall.
They accumulate for ordinary reasons. You renamed a service page. You deleted an old product. A supplier redesigned their site and every link you sent them now lands nowhere. A plugin update changed the address structure of your blog. None of these feel like breakage at the time, and none of them announce themselves afterward. The links keep sitting there, in your menu, in your footer, and inside posts you wrote years ago and have not opened since.
The good news is that this is one of the few website problems with a clean, finite fix. You can find every broken link on a normal site in an afternoon, repair them properly, and then keep them from returning with a monthly habit that takes five minutes. Here is the whole process in plain language.
The obvious cost is the visitor you lose. Someone reading your article clicks a link for more detail and hits an error page. That person was engaged, curious, and moving toward you. Now they are looking at a dead end, and the most common next action is the back button followed by a return to search results, where your competitor is waiting.
The second cost is trust, and it is heavier than most owners expect. A dead link reads as neglect. It suggests nobody has looked after this site recently, which raises the quiet question of whether anybody is looking after the business either. On a page where you are asking for a booking, a call, or a card number, that impression is expensive.
The third cost is discovery. Search engines follow your internal links to understand what exists on your site and how the pages relate. When those paths dead end, some pages become harder to reach and slower to be re updated in the index. The same is true of the AI assistants that now read sites on behalf of users. They follow links to gather context, and a broken trail simply means the information they were looking for never gets found and never gets quoted.
Start with a crawler, because manual clicking will not scale past a handful of pages. A free link checking tool visits every page you have, follows each link on it, and reports back the address of anything that returns an error. Broken Link Checker, the free tier of Screaming Frog, or the built in checker in your website platform will all do the job. Point it at your home page, let it run, and export the list when it finishes.
Then open Google Search Console and look at the pages report. It shows the addresses Google tried to fetch and could not, which matters more than a crawler result, because these are pages the search engine already knows about and may still be sending people to. If a page appears there and once earned traffic, it deserves a redirect rather than a shrug.
Do not skip your own analytics. Filter your reports for views of the error page and look at the referring address. That tells you which broken links real humans are hitting most often, which is the only ranking that matters when you decide what to repair first. A dead link nobody clicks can wait. A dead link on your pricing page cannot.
Pay special attention to the places you never look at as a visitor. Navigation menus, footers, sidebar promotions, author bios, email signature links, and old blog posts are where most broken links live. You built them once, they worked, and you have not clicked them since.
For a link inside your own content that points to a page you moved or renamed, the fix is to edit the link and point it at the correct address. It takes seconds and it is permanent. Adding a redirect instead leaves a wrong link on the page forever, adds a hop that slows the visit slightly, and buries a small mess for whoever manages the site next.
Redirects are the right answer in a different situation: when the old address is out in the world. If a page was shared, printed, linked to by another site, or ranked in search results, people will keep requesting the old address no matter what you change on your side. That is what a permanent redirect is for. It sends the visitor and the search engine straight to the replacement and passes along most of the value the old page had earned.
Send each old address to its closest real match. A discontinued blue mixer should land on the current mixer, not on the shop index and certainly not on your home page. Sending everything to the home page is the most common mistake here. Visitors arrive with no idea why, and search engines often treat that as a not found result in disguise, which means you lose the value you were trying to keep.
When there is no replacement at all, let the page return a proper not found response and make that page useful. A short, human explanation, a search box, and links to your main sections will rescue a good share of those visits. Removing the broken link from wherever it appeared is still the real fix.
External links rot faster than internal ones, because you do not control the other end. A study you cited moves behind a login, a tool you recommended shuts down, a partner rebuilds their site with a new address structure. Your page is unchanged and now sends readers into a wall.
Check outbound links as part of the same crawl, then handle them by case. If the source still exists somewhere, update the link. If the page is genuinely gone but the point still stands, link to an archived copy or to a current equivalent. If the recommendation is stale, cut it and adjust the sentence around it, which is often a chance to refresh a paragraph that was already out of date.
Older, longer articles are the biggest offenders. The ones full of helpful references were your best work, and they are exactly the pages where the most links have quietly expired since publication.
Broken links are not a one time cleanup. They return every time you rename a page, retire a product, or update a plugin. The habit that prevents the pile up is small. Run a crawl once a month, check Search Console at the same time, and clear whatever appears while the list is still short.
Two rules make the monthly list shorter. First, when you delete or rename a page, set the redirect in the same sitting, before you move on. Second, when you link out, prefer stable sources such as official documentation and established publications over posts that may not exist in a year.
If you want the fastest possible read on where you stand right now, run a free health check on your site. It scores your Performance, SEO, Best Practices, Accessibility, and Agentic Browsing, so you can see whether broken links are your real problem or a symptom of something larger that deserves attention first.
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Every broken link on your site was working once. Finding them is simply a matter of looking, and the looking is free. Your free website health check is at healthypage.help/check