How to Check for Broken Links on Your Website (And Fix Them Before They Tank Your SEO)
There is a type of problem that hides in plain sight on your website. It doesn’t announce itself. Your homepage still looks fine. Your blog posts are still publishing. But somewhere in the background, links that used to work are quietly sending visitors — and Google — to dead ends.
I discovered this on my own site during a routine audit. I had been blogging consistently, building out service pages, adding freebies and resources. Every time I moved or renamed a page, or a tool I’d linked to changed their URL, a broken link got left behind. By the time I actually ran a scan, I had more errors than I expected — and some of them were on pages that were supposed to be driving inquiries.
The frustrating part wasn’t finding them. It was realizing how long they’d probably been there, quietly signaling to Google that my site wasn’t being maintained. Fixing broken links won’t transform your rankings overnight, but leaving them unaddressed is like trying to fill a bucket with holes in it. No matter how good your content is, something is always leaking.
This guide walks you through exactly what broken links are, why they matter for your SEO, which free tools find them fastest, and how to fix them step by step — without spending hours clicking through every page manually.
For the bigger picture of how broken links fit into your overall SEO health, my complete SEO guide for service providers covers the full technical and content foundation.
Key Points
Broken links hurt your SEO by signaling to search engines that your site isn’t well-maintained, which can lower rankings over time.
They damage user experience and trust, causing potential clients to leave before ever booking a call or exploring your services.
Free tools exist to automatically scan your entire site — no need to click through every page manually.
Prioritize fixes by impact — start with high-traffic pages, service pages, and content in your sales funnel.
Schedule regular audits so broken links get caught before they compound into a bigger problem.
Broken external links are a content opportunity — if the resource you linked to is gone, consider writing your own post on that topic instead.
Why Broken Links Are Bad News for Your SEO
Broken links might seem like a minor inconvenience — a small technical hiccup. But they create ripple effects across your entire online presence that are worth taking seriously.
They Hurt Your Search Rankings
Search engines like Google crawl your website regularly to understand what it’s about and how well it serves visitors. When Google encounters broken links, it reads that as a signal that your site isn’t being maintained. Over time, this contributes to lower trust scores and can drag down the rankings of pages that are otherwise performing well.
There’s also a backlink angle. If another website has linked to a page on your site that you later deleted or renamed without a redirect, that incoming link — which was building your authority — is now pointing to nothing. You lose the SEO value it was passing to you. That “link juice” (yes, that’s the actual term) disappears every time someone links to a dead page.
They Break the Client Journey
Your website should feel like a clear, confident path that guides someone from “I found this helpful post” to “I want to work with this person.” Every internal link is a step on that path. When one breaks, the journey stops.
Think about it from the reader’s perspective: they’re engaged, they’ve been reading your blog, they click a link expecting to learn more or download a resource — and they hit a 404 error. Trust drops. Most people don’t click back. They leave.
Every broken link is a missed opportunity to move someone deeper into your content ecosystem and closer to booking a call.
They Signal to Clients That You’re Not Paying Attention
Your website is often the first interaction a potential client has with your brand. A broken link — especially on a services page or a key blog post — sends a subtle but real message: things aren’t being looked after here. Even if that’s not true in your practice, that’s the impression it creates. And first impressions matter.
What Causes Broken Links
Broken links don’t usually happen all at once. They accumulate as your website evolves. The most common causes:
- You updated or deleted a page without setting up a redirect
- An external resource moved or disappeared — a tool changed its URL, a blog post got deleted, a partner’s website went offline
- You migrated your website to a new platform or domain
- A typo crept in when you manually added a link
- A file was removed or renamed — a PDF, a download, or an image
- You changed a page’s slug (the end of the URL) and the old links weren’t updated
The more content you have — blog posts, service pages, resources, lead magnets — the more opportunities there are for links to break. This isn’t a sign that something is wrong with your site. It’s just what happens as a site grows. The goal isn’t to have a perfect site forever; it’s to audit regularly so errors get caught quickly.
How to Check for Broken Links: Step-by-Step
Step 1: Know Where Links Live on Your Site
Before you scan, take a moment to think through all the places links appear. This gives you context when you review your results and helps you prioritize fixes:
- Homepage, about page, and service pages
- Blog posts (especially older ones that link to external resources)
- Landing pages and sales pages
- Freebie and lead magnet download links
- Email templates and automated sequences
- PDFs, worksheets, and downloadable guides
- Calendar invites or appointment booking links
- Any community platforms or pinned posts that reference your site
You don’t need to check everything at once. Having this map in your head helps you triage.
Step 2: Use a Broken Link Checker Tool
Manually clicking every link on your site is not a good use of your time. Use a tool that scans automatically and generates a report. Here are the best free options:
Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free for up to 500 URLs) The most thorough option. Download the desktop app, enter your URL, and it crawls your entire site and flags broken links, redirect chains, and missing alt text all in one report. This is the tool I use during site audits.
Broken Link Checker (free browser plugin or online tool) Simpler and faster for smaller sites. Good for a quick sweep if you just want to find 404 errors without a full technical audit.
Ahrefs Site Audit (paid, but highly thorough) If you’re already using Ahrefs for keyword research, the site audit feature is excellent for ongoing monitoring. It catches broken links alongside a full list of technical issues.
Google Search Console — Coverage Report (free) Go to the Pages section (formerly Coverage) in Google Search Console and look for pages showing 404 errors or “Not Found” status. This tells you which of your pages are broken from Google’s perspective — which is the most important vantage point.
When you run your scan, export the report to a spreadsheet. You’ll want a clean list to work through systematically rather than trying to fix everything from inside the tool.
Step 3: Manually Check Non-Website Assets
Link scanning tools are great for crawling your live website, but they won’t catch everything. You’ll also need to manually review:
- Email sequences and automations — open a few key emails and test the links, especially any that direct to freebies, service pages, or booking links
- PDFs and downloadable resources — open them and test any embedded links
- High-traffic blog posts — give your top performers extra attention, since these are the pages where broken links cost you the most
This step takes more time, but it’s worth it for content that directly impacts your sales funnel or client onboarding.
Step 4: Categorize and Prioritize Fixes
Not all broken links carry the same weight. As you review your report, sort by:
- Internal links (links to your own pages) — highest priority to fix
- External links (links to other websites) — important, but lower urgency
- File and download links (PDFs, templates, images) — medium priority
- Affiliate or tracking links — check these promptly since they affect revenue
Then fix in order of impact. Your service pages, homepage, and any content in your sales funnel come first. Older blog posts with fewer readers come second.
Step 5: Fix Internal Broken Links
For links to your own content, you have three options:
- Update the URL if the page has moved to a new location
- Set up a 301 redirect if you’ve permanently deleted or renamed the page — this tells both search engines and visitors where to go instead, and preserves the SEO value the page had accumulated
- Remove the link if it’s no longer relevant
In most cases, setting up a 301 redirect is the smartest move. It preserves your authority and ensures anyone who bookmarked the old URL or found it through an old search result still lands somewhere useful. Redirects can be set up through your SEO plugin (Rank Math or Yoast both handle this well) or through your hosting provider.
Step 6: Fix External Broken Links
External links break when the website or resource you linked to moves, deletes content, or goes offline. Here’s what to do:
- Search for an updated link if the content exists somewhere new
- Replace it with a similar resource if the original is gone
- Write your own post on that topic if you can’t find a good replacement — this is actually one of my favorite content strategies. If a valuable external resource has disappeared and you were linking to it, that’s a gap in the web that you can fill. Not only does it fix the broken link problem, it gives you new content to rank for and strengthens your topical authority
- Remove the link entirely if there’s no good replacement and the reference no longer adds value
Step 7: Fix Broken Download Links
If a PDF, worksheet, or other downloadable resource isn’t loading:
- Re-upload the file to your website or file storage system
- Copy the new URL and replace the old one everywhere it appears
- Test the new link to confirm it works
A practical tip: keep all your downloadable resources in a single central folder on your site. When you need to update a file, you only have to update it in one place instead of hunting down every location where it was linked.
Step 8: Re-Test After Fixing
Once you’ve made your fixes, run another quick scan to confirm the errors are cleared. You can also manually click through the pages where you made changes as a final check.
If you’re still seeing errors after fixing what you found, it may be a more technical redirect issue that needs a developer’s eye.
How Often Should You Check for Broken Links?
- Quarterly for most websites — set a calendar reminder and treat it like a routine check-up
- Monthly if you publish content frequently or have a high-traffic site
- Immediately after any major updates, site migrations, or platform changes
The more actively you’re building out your site — adding blog posts, updating service pages, adding new lead magnets — the more frequently links can break. Staying on top of it prevents a small issue from compounding into a site-wide problem that takes a full afternoon to untangle.
Broken Links and the Bigger SEO Picture
Broken links are one piece of your site’s overall technical health. They’re connected to everything else: your site speed, how Google crawls and indexes your pages, how much authority flows between your posts, and how smoothly visitors move from discovering you to contacting you.
If you’ve been publishing great content but wondering why your traffic isn’t moving, technical issues like broken links, crawl errors, and indexing problems are always worth checking before you question your strategy or your writing. The data in Google Search Console will often point you to exactly where the problem is.
And if all of this — the auditing, the fixing, the strategy behind what to write and how to link it — feels like too much to manage alongside a full practice, that’s exactly what I help with.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a broken link on a website? A broken link is a hyperlink that no longer leads to its intended destination. Instead of opening the expected page, it returns an error — most commonly a 404 “Page Not Found” error. Broken links happen when pages are deleted, renamed, or moved without a redirect being set up.
How do I find broken links on my website for free? The fastest free options are Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free for up to 500 URLs), the Broken Link Checker browser plugin, or the Coverage/Pages report inside Google Search Console. For a full technical picture, Screaming Frog is the most thorough.
Do broken links hurt SEO? Yes. Broken links signal to search engines that your site isn’t well-maintained, which can reduce trust and lower rankings over time. They also waste “link equity” — the authority that could be passing between your pages but is instead hitting a dead end.
How do I fix a broken link? For internal links (to your own pages), either update the URL to the correct destination, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one, or remove the link if it’s no longer relevant. For external links, find an updated version of the resource or replace it with something comparable.
What is a 301 redirect and do I need one? A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect that tells search engines and browsers that a page has moved to a new URL. When you delete or rename a page that had inbound links or traffic, setting up a 301 redirect preserves the SEO value and prevents visitors from hitting a dead end. Most SEO plugins like Rank Math and Yoast make it easy to set these up without touching code.
How often should I check for broken links? For most service-based websites, a quarterly audit is sufficient. If you publish new content frequently or recently completed a site migration or redesign, check monthly. Always run a full audit immediately after any major site changes.
Can broken links on other websites hurt me? If another site links to a page on your site that no longer exists, you lose the SEO value of that backlink. Setting up a 301 redirect from the old URL to a relevant current page recovers that value. You can find which external sites are linking to you through the Links section in Google Search Console.
Final Thoughts
Broken links are not glamorous. They’re not the kind of thing that shows up in a before-and-after case study or makes for a compelling Instagram post. But they’re the kind of quiet maintenance that separates a site that compounds over time from one that stalls.
Think of your website as a physical office. You wouldn’t leave a broken door handle on the front entrance for months without fixing it. You wouldn’t put up signage that directs clients to a room that no longer exists. The same care applies online — it just requires a different kind of walk-through.
A quarterly audit, a reliable free tool, and a systematic approach to fixes is all it takes. The content and strategy side of your site should get the attention and creativity. The technical side just needs regular maintenance.
If you want to make sure your site’s technical foundation, content strategy, and copy are all working together — download my price and service guide to see exactly how I help service providers build websites that get found and convert.
Or start with the free resource: Stop Panicking When Clients Graduate: Your Website’s Guide to Organic Inquiries
