In this guide
A broken link sends a visitor (or Google's crawler) to a page that answers with an error, usually 404 Not Found. One or two are normal on a living website; dozens are a sign of a site nobody is looking after, and they quietly cost you visitors, sales and crawl budget.
Key takeaways
- A broken link is any link that answers with an error, usually 404; check internal links, external links and images.
- Fix each one by updating the link, redirecting the old address to its true replacement, or removing the link.
- Never redirect every missing page to the home page: Google treats that as a soft 404.
- Links break again whenever pages move, so check weekly rather than once.
Why broken links matter
- Visitors who hit a 404 often leave the site instead of looking further.
- Search engines spend their crawl time on dead ends instead of your real pages.
- Links from other websites to a page that no longer exists pass no value to you.
- On shops, a broken link in a menu or a product grid is a lost order.
Find them: internal, external and images
Broken links come in three kinds: internal links to your own pages, external links to other websites, and resources such as images, scripts and PDFs. A crawler finds all three by following every link from the home page, the way a search engine does.
Run the free broken link checker on your home page. It lists each broken link, the status code it returned, and the pages that contain it, so you know exactly where to edit.
Fix each one the right way
- The page moved: update the link to the new address. If other sites link to the old address, also add a 301 redirect from old to new.
- The page was deleted on purpose and has a close replacement: redirect it (301) to that replacement, not to the home page.
- The page was deleted and nothing replaces it: remove the link, and let the old address answer 404 or 410.
- An external site removed its page: link to a better source, or remove the link.
- A typo in the address (a missing slash, http instead of https, a stray space): correct the link itself.
Where broken links usually hide
- Menus and footers copied between templates, so one bad link appears on every page.
- Old blog posts that link to products or campaigns that no longer exist.
- Links written by hand in page builders, with a typo in the address.
- Images and PDFs uploaded to an old media path after a site move.
Keep them from coming back
Every time you rename a page, delete a product or move to a new theme, links can break. Rather than checking by hand, let a weekly crawl do it: Studio's monitoring runs a full health check every week and emails you when new problems appear.
Checklist
- Run the broken link checker on your home page.
- Fix links in the menu and footer first: they repeat on every page.
- Update moved pages and add a 301 redirect for old addresses with outside links.
- Remove links to pages that are gone for good.
- Replace dead links to other websites with a current source.
- Turn on weekly monitoring so new broken links are reported.
Questions
Should I redirect every 404 to the home page?
No. Google treats a redirect to an unrelated page, like the home page, as a soft 404, and visitors are confused. Redirect only to a page with the same purpose; otherwise let it return 404.
Do broken external links hurt my SEO?
A few will not move your rankings, but they make pages less useful. Fix them when you update a page, and fix the ones in templates first because they repeat on every page.
What is the difference between 404 and 410?
404 means not found; 410 means gone on purpose. Both tell search engines to drop the page. 410 is slightly faster, but either is fine.