One thing that will frustrate your website visitors, discredit your brand, and effect your Google rankings are broken links on your website. Broken links, also known as dead links, result in 404 error pages. In this article I am going to show you how to find and fix broken links in your website.
External broken links can happen when a site that you link to no longer exists or moves/deletes a page or a piece of content, such as images or videos, that you are linking to.
Internal broken links can happen if you have moved or deleted content on your own website. Also, If you have ever moved your site to a different server this can cause the problem. If you ever move your website from one server to another, it’s a great idea to perform a link check after the move is complete.
Fortunately, there is a quick, easy and free way to find out if your website has any broken links. What’s more, this method works wether or not you have a WordPress site.
If you visit BrokenLinkCheck.com you simply have to enter the url to your website and let the website do its magic.
What next?
I have created a quick video to show you what to do with the results of your report…
No time for this?
If this is your first time at bat with this, what can happen after running this test is that you get a bit overwhelmed.
That’s totally understandable. If you’d like to pass this job off to somebody else and get back to work, have your tech support person take care of it. If you don’t have one of those, feel free to contact me. I’d love to help you out!
For WordPress Sites
If you are running a WordPress website as I am, the first question I always ask is, “Is there a plugin that can do the job easily for me?”
Well, it just so happens there are a few plugins that can help identify problems as well. However, they are quite a bit more involved than the simple method I described above. If you have time and are comfortable with the more complicated matters of the dashboard of your WordPress site, you may want to give them a try.
The three plugins I tried are Link Checker, which had conflicts with the Wordfence plugin, WP Broken Link Status Checker and Broken Link Checker. At the time of publishing this post, all three plugins had not been updated in 3 months, and none of them were showing to be compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
The Broken Link Checker plugin had no obvious way to check the links immediately. What you could do, though, which I did not notice if the other plugins could do, was perform link checks at hourly intervals you could specify. That seems like it may be a useful feature.