// SEO
How to Find Broken Links on Your Website (and Fix Them Fast)
Dead links bleed SEO equity and frustrate visitors. This guide shows you how to find every broken link on your site, prioritize fixes by impact, and prevent them from creeping back.
Why broken links compound quietly
Broken links are one of those website problems that feel minor until you look at the data. A single dead link on your homepage wastes a click from every visitor who lands there. A 404 on a product page that other sites have linked to throws away months of acquired link equity the moment a Googlebot follows it. And because broken links accumulate passively — pages get renamed, external sites go dark, old blog posts link to products you've discontinued — the problem on a two-year-old site is almost always worse than the owner expects.
The good news: broken links are almost entirely fixable, they're quick to fix individually, and the tools to find them are free. What's missing for most sites isn't capability — it's the habit of actually checking.
The four types of broken links you need to catch
A useful audit distinguishes between link types, because the fix and the urgency differ for each.
- Internal 404s: your own pages linking to your own dead URLs. These are the highest priority — you control both ends and can fix them completely with a redirect or a corrected href
- External dead links: your site linking out to pages on other sites that have since moved or disappeared. Lower urgency, but they signal to search engines that your content isn't being maintained
- Redirect chains: technically not 404s, but links that bounce through 2–4 redirects before reaching the destination. Each hop loses a small fraction of link equity and adds latency
- Broken resource links: images, CSS files, and JavaScript files returning 404s. These don't show up as page errors but break visual rendering and can tank Core Web Vitals scores
How to find broken links: free methods that actually work
The most thorough approach is a full site crawl — the same thing Google does when it visits your site. A crawler follows every link it finds and records the HTTP status code of each destination. You get a list of every URL that returned a 4xx or 5xx response, organized by which page the link appeared on.
WebEnture's Broken Links Agent (/broken-links-agent) runs this crawl for free. Enter your URL and it maps every internal and external link on the crawled pages, flags anything that returned an error code, and surfaces redirect chains. For sites with more than 10 pages, the full dashboard crawl extends coverage to 100 pages. The report is organized by severity — internal 404s first, then chains, then external dead links — so you always know what to fix first.
If you want to check a single page rather than a full site, Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool shows you the links Google found on any URL and whether it encountered any errors following them. It's not a substitute for a full crawl, but it's useful for auditing your most important pages quickly.
Fixing broken links without making more
The standard fix for a broken internal link is a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new destination. This preserves accumulated link equity, updates the path for any incoming links you can't control, and keeps bookmarks and cached links working. Set the redirect in your server config, your CMS redirect manager, or your CDN — wherever your platform handles routing.
For deleted pages with no logical replacement, return a 404 or 410 Gone rather than redirecting everything to the homepage. Redirecting broken links to the homepage is a common shortcut that search engines recognize immediately — Google has explicitly said these 'redirect chains to the homepage' are treated as soft 404s, not valid redirects.
- Fix internal 404s: add a 301 redirect from the old URL to the closest relevant live page
- Update the source link: also correct the href in your HTML so future crawls don't rely on the redirect
- Flatten redirect chains: wherever you have A → B → C, update the chain so A → C directly
- Handle external dead links: either find the new URL for the resource and update the link, or remove the link if the resource no longer exists anywhere useful
- For deleted products or pages with no equivalent, return a 410 Gone and create a custom error page that offers navigation to relevant sections
Try it yourself: scan your site for broken links
Run WebEnture's Broken Links Agent (/broken-links-agent) against your site now — it takes under two minutes and surfaces every dead link with the exact page and anchor text where it appears. No signup required for your first scan.
After fixing the immediate issues, set up a monthly crawl schedule to catch breaks as they appear. Sites with active blogs or product catalogs typically accumulate 3–5 new broken links per month from external sites going dark alone. Catching them on a 30-day cycle means you're always within a month of clean.