How to Find Broken Links on Your Website

A broken link is one of those quiet problems that damages your website's credibility without you realizing it. When a visitor clicks on a link and hits a 404 error page, they're not just frustrated — they're doubting whether your site is being maintained. For e-commerce sites, a broken product link is a lost sale. For service businesses, a broken resource link looks unprofessional.

The challenge: most website owners don't know they have broken links until a customer complains. By then, the damage is done. The good news? Finding broken links is straightforward once you know where to look.

Why Broken Links Happen

Broken links appear for a few common reasons:

• External links change or disappear. A blog post you linked to gets deleted. A partner's website restructures. A social media platform shuts down.
• Internal links break during site updates. You move pages around or change URLs but forget to update old links pointing to them.
• Typos in URLs. A link is set to www.example.com/contact-us but the actual page is www.example.com/contact.
• Server errors. A page that used to exist is now temporarily or permanently unavailable.

Method 1: Manual Checking (Free, Time-Consuming)

If you only have 10–20 pages, you can manually click through every link. It's tedious, but it works:

1. Make a list of every page on your site.
2. Visit each page in your browser.
3. Right-click and open each link in a new tab.
4. Check that each one loads (no 404 error).

For larger sites, this quickly becomes impractical. A 50-page site with 5 links per page means 250 clicks. That's an hour of work, and you'd need to repeat it monthly to catch new broken links.

Method 2: Free Online Link Checkers (Quick Start)

Services like the W3C Link Checker (validator.w3.org/checklink) scan your site and report broken links. Steps:

1. Visit the checker's website.
2. Paste your site's URL.
3. Let it crawl and report results.
4. Fix the broken links it finds.

Pros: Free, no signup. Cons: No automation. You have to run it manually every time you want to check, and they often cap how many pages they'll scan for free.

Method 3: Automated Link Monitoring (Hands-Off)

The best approach is to let a monitoring tool check your site automatically. Here's how it works:

1. You provide your website URL.
2. The tool crawls your entire site.
3. It checks every link (internal and external).
4. You get a report showing exactly which links are broken and why.
5. The tool rescans your site on a schedule (weekly, monthly) to catch new problems.

Pros: Automatic, covers your entire site (including depth 2 and 3 pages), catches new broken links before customers do. Cons: Usually requires a paid subscription.

Which Method Should You Use?

Fix What You Find

Once you've found broken links, fixing them is straightforward:

• If a link points to a missing internal page, update it to the correct URL or remove it.
• If an external link is broken, either update it to a new source or remove it.
• Test the fixed link to make sure it works.

Keep Broken Links Out for Good

The best strategy isn't just finding broken links once—it's preventing them from happening repeatedly. Running a check every month takes 10 minutes and catches problems early, before they affect your visitors or search engine rankings.

Your website is often the first impression you make. A few broken links might seem minor, but they signal to visitors that the site isn't being maintained. Regular monitoring ensures your site always works the way it should.