Broken Links 101: How to Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Website

Did you know you can improve your SEO without writing a single new blog post or “optimizing” anything? Sometimes, the fastest way to improve your website is to clean up what’s already there, and one of the easiest places to start is to fix broken links.

Almost every website has broken links. Most website owners have no idea they exist. And fixing them? Way easier than you think.

Let’s walk through it.

What is a broken link?

A broken link is any link on your website that leads to a 404 Page Not Found error. In other words… you click it, and the page it goes to does not exist. It might look something like this:

Broken links are a totally normal part of having a website. Your website changes, other websites change, businesses close… and, naturally, some URLs no longer work.

If you update a URL on your own site without creating a redirect, you’ll end up with a broken internal link.

If another website that you’ve linked to in the past deletes or changes a page, you can end up with a broken external link.

It happens! No shame here, but it is worth setting aside time to clean them up once or twice a year.

Are broken links bad for SEO?

Short answer: yes, broken links are bad for SEO… but not in a catastrophic “nobody will ever find you in search again” kind of way. Broken links are more of a quality issue.

Think of it this way: Google wants to send people to websites that feel trustworthy, up-to-date, and easy to use. If your site is sending people to a bunch of 404s, it’s not going to be a great user experience.

Not only can broken links frustrate visitors, but they make your website feel broken or neglected. Google doesn’t want to waste time crawling pages that go nowhere, either.

You don’t need a perfect site, but cleaning up broken links helps reinforce that your site is high-quality and regularly maintained.

How to Find Broken Links on Your Website

PLEASE do not open every page on your site and begin clicking on links one by one. There are better ways to find broken links! SEO tools, like Ubersuggest and SEMRush, allow you to run site audits that catch broken links for you. 

Instead of clicking around your website like mad, you can look at a report and know exactly where to start fixing links.

Looking for a free option? We love brokenlinkcheck.com for an easy, no-cost scan!

No matter the tool you choose, you’ll get a report that usually includes:

• The page where the broken link exists
• The actual broken URL
• Sometimes the anchor text (the clickable text, which makes it easier to find)

When reviewing your broken link report, focus on fixing the true 404 errors first. Other issues like “timeout” or “bad host” are often temporary and resolve on their own.

How to Fix Broken Links on Your Website

Once you’ve got your list, fixing broken links is pretty straightforward. You’ve got two main option:

1. Remove the link entirely

If the page no longer exists and there’s no good replacement, just unlink the text. Easy-peasy.

2. Update the link with the correct URL

If the page does exist somewhere else, or if there is more relevant content on the site, you can just update it with the correct destination URL. 

A few things to look out for

• Typos happen more than you think! Pasting an incomplete URL or creating a link with just words (and not a URL) is super common. Watch out for accuracy!
• Some broken links are not your fault. If another website removed or changed a page, your link will break and that’s OK. Just update it or delete it.
• You might come across broken links you cannot fix. Some website platforms have quirks and will automatically create links that don’t work properly. For example, if you create a blog tag with punctuation, your website might not know what to do with the punctuation and generate a broken URL. In this case, the fix is to delete or rename the tag — but it’s also OK if you just leave it. A few broken links are not going to ruin your SEO.

What if you have a LOT of broken links?

Again, totally normal. If your site has been around for a while, you might open that report and think… “cool cool cool, I’ll just ignore this… forever.”

Instead, here’s an easy triage plan to start:

1. Fix links that appear sitewide (think links in your footer, main navigation, etc.)
2. Then move to your most important pages (home, services, that blog post that gets 100s of visits every month)

These changes will make the biggest impact first. After that, you can shift gears to fixing random internal links and any broken external links that come up.

Let’s clean up those links

Fixing broken links is one of the easiest SEO wins out there.

No new content. No keyword research. No big strategy.

Just a quick cleanup makes your site easier to use, more trustworthy to visitors, and more efficient for search engines and AI tools to crawl.

I recommend checking for broken links once or twice a year to make sure your site is well maintained.

For those who prefer video instructions, check out my 7-minute YouTube video where I walk through these steps:

Looking for more low-lift website maintenance tips? Check out my blog post, Website Cleanup: Improve Your SEO Without Creating Anything.