How to Find & Fix Broken Links (2026)

Broken links waste crawl budget, frustrate visitors, and leak link equity. Here's how to find and fix 404s across your whole site, fast.

A broken link points to a page that no longer exists (a 404) or to a server that never answers. A handful are normal on any site that has been around a while — pages get deleted, products get discontinued, other sites move their content. But once broken links pile up, they quietly drag down both your SEO and your conversions, and most site owners never notice until traffic has already slipped.

This guide covers the three questions that actually matter: why broken links hurt, exactly how to find every one of them, and how to fix each type properly so the problem doesn't come straight back.

Why broken links hurt (more than people think)

• Wasted crawl budget. Google allocates a rough amount of crawling to your site. Every request it spends hitting a dead URL is a request it didn't spend on your real, revenue-earning pages. On a small site this barely registers; on a 5,000-page store with hundreds of dead links, it adds up fast.
• Leaked link equity. When another page links to a URL that now 404s, the authority that link would have passed drains into a dead end instead of flowing to a live page. That's ranking power you paid for (or earned) and are now throwing away.
• Bad user experience. Visitors who hit a 404 usually bounce, and a frustrated user is a lost customer. Worse, a broken link in your checkout flow or from a high-traffic blog post can cost you sales directly.
• Trust signals. A site riddled with dead links reads as neglected — to users and, over time, to search engines assessing whether your content is well maintained.

Internal vs. external broken links

There are two kinds, and they're fixed differently:

• Internal broken links point from one of your pages to another page on your site that no longer exists. These are entirely your fault and entirely in your control — and they're the ones that waste crawl budget and leak equity internally.
• External broken links (outbound) point from your site to someone else's page that has since disappeared. You can't fix their site, but you can update or remove the link so your readers don't hit a dead end.

How to find every broken link

Start with the free sources, then escalate only if you need to:

1. Google Search Console. The Pages (indexing) report flags URLs Google tried to crawl and got a "Not found (404)" on. This catches internal links Google has already discovered, and it's free. Check it monthly.
2. An instant on-page check. The free Audit SEO tool counts the internal and external links on a page and flags thin, low-value pages in a single scan. It's the fastest way to sanity-check an important page, though it won't request every link to test the response.
3. A dedicated link checker or crawler. To hunt down the actual 404s across a whole site, you need something that requests every URL and records the status code. A scheduled site crawler does this and re-checks on a timer so new breaks surface automatically.

Before / after: spotting a broken internal link

<!-- BEFORE: points at a page you deleted last spring -->
<a href="/services/old-package">See our packages</a>   → 404

<!-- AFTER: points at the live replacement -->
<a href="/services/pricing">See our packages</a>     → 200

How to fix each type

• 301-redirect a removed page to the closest relevant live page. A 301 is a permanent redirect and passes almost all of the original page's link equity to the new destination — this is how you recover leaked authority.
• Update the internal links that point at the old URL so they hit the new one directly. Relying on a redirect forever adds a hop; fixing the source link is cleaner and faster.
• Restore or recreate the page if it was deleted by mistake and still earns traffic or backlinks. Sometimes the right fix is to bring the page back.
• Fix or remove outbound links. If the site you linked to moved its content, update the URL. If it's gone for good, remove the link or point it somewhere equally useful.
• Don't blanket-redirect everything to your homepage. Google treats a mass "soft 404" redirect to the homepage as unhelpful, and it confuses users. Match each dead URL to a genuinely relevant page, or let it 404 honestly if there's no good match.

FAQ

Do broken links directly lower my rankings? Not as a direct penalty. The damage is indirect: wasted crawl budget, leaked equity, and users bouncing. Those second-order effects are what cost you rankings and revenue.

Is a 404 always bad? No. A genuinely deleted page with no replacement should return a 404 (or 410). The problem is links that point at 404s, not the 404 status itself.

How often should I check? A quick Search Console glance monthly, plus a full crawl quarterly for small sites — or a scheduled crawl if your site changes often.

Fixing broken links is one slice of a healthy site. It pairs naturally with tightening your technical SEO foundation and keeping your set up robots.txt and sitemaps correct so Google can reach the pages that do work.