How to Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Website

A broken link is a link that points to a page that no longer exists, returning a 404 error. Visitors who click broken links hit a dead end instead of the content they expected — a poor experience that reduces trust and increases the likelihood they leave. Search engines that follow broken links during crawling find them a waste of crawl capacity, and a site with many broken internal links signals poor maintenance.

Fixing broken links is a straightforward maintenance task that most websites benefit from checking at least twice per year. Here is how to find them and what to do about each type.

How to find broken links

Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 URLs) is the most thorough tool for finding broken links on a website. Crawl your site, filter for 4xx status codes, and you have a complete list of every broken link and the page it appears on. For larger sites, the paid version removes the URL limit. Ahrefs and SEMrush also identify broken links in their site audit features if you use those tools.

Google Search Console (free) identifies broken pages that Google has found — check Coverage > Excluded > Not Found (404) for a list of URLs Google has crawled and found missing. This is particularly useful for catching broken links that were previously indexed and may have accumulated backlinks.

Fixing internal broken links

Internal broken links — links from one of your own pages to another of your own pages — are the most straightforward to fix. Either update the link to point to the correct current URL, or remove the link if the page no longer exists and no equivalent page has replaced it.

If you have recently changed URL structures (migrated from WordPress, renamed services, reorganised a blog), you may have a large volume of internal broken links. The right solution is to set up 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new equivalent pages — this sends both visitors and search engine link equity to the correct destination without requiring you to update every internal link manually.

Handling external broken links

External broken links — links from your pages to other websites that no longer work — are less critical for SEO but still harm user experience. Review them and either update the link to the new URL of the destination, replace it with a different relevant resource, or remove the link if no suitable replacement exists.

A special case is broken external links that carried significant link equity — pages on other sites that linked to your content before it moved. If a page you had linked from other sites is now a 404, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the closest equivalent current page. This recovers the link equity that would otherwise be lost.