How to find and fix broken links on your website

Broken links are one of the most common and most damaging issues on live websites. They frustrate users, signal poor maintenance to search engines, and can cause real conversion losses when they appear on key pages.

Why broken links happen

Links break for predictable reasons. Pages get deleted or moved without redirects. External sites go offline. CMS migrations change URL structures. Content editors update slugs without updating internal links. Over time, every website accumulates broken links — it is not a sign of incompetence, it is just entropy.

The impact of broken links

A 404 on a product page means a lost sale. A 404 in a navigation menu means every visitor who clicks it has a bad experience. A 404 on a page that other sites link to is a lost backlink. Broken links also signal to Google that a site is not well-maintained, which can affect crawling and ranking.

How to find broken links

The most reliable method is using a real browser to check every link. Raw HTTP requests (curl, fetch) produce false positives because many sites return 200 for bots but serve a different page to real users, or return 403 for automated requests that would return 200 in a real browser.

Lintry uses a real Chromium browser for every link check, which eliminates false positives. A scan of any page returns every link with its actual HTTP status and the exact element that contains the broken link.

How to fix broken links

Once you have a list of broken links, the fix depends on the cause. If the destination page was moved, add a redirect from the old URL to the new one. If the page was deleted, update the link to point to a relevant alternative. If the external site went offline, remove the link or replace it with an archived version.

For CMS-based sites, a redirect plugin handles most cases. For custom-built sites, redirects belong in the server config or a middleware layer.

Preventing broken links

The best prevention is a repeatable QA process. Run a link check before every deploy and after every major content change. Set up weekly automated scans on production so new broken links get caught before users report them.