In your website, you'll have a large number of links pointing to internal pages and quite possibly external links pointing to a variety of resources. Often, the internal links might not change that much because you're likely to be in control of them and will want to keep them for SEO. Occasionally however, if you make large changes to your site, you might accidentally "break" these URL pathways. It can be difficult to keep up with all the broken ones.
Perhaps even more problematic, are the external URL links and linkbacks that you've created across your site. You have no control over what the linked-to third parties do to their pages and articles, and it can be a nightmare keeping track of all their deletions, 404s and moves that happen frequently, usually without your knowledge.
In either case, having a lot of broken URLs on your site can be both frustrating to your users and bad from an SEO perspective. For this reason, we recommend that you install and use a broken link monitoring app. There are many apps or plugins available for WordPress and one such is "Broken Link Checker". If you need help installing or configuring it, please let us know.
How to check broken links with Broken Link Checker
- Login to your WordPress admin
- If not already installed, install the plugin
- Once installed and configured, the plugin will search for broken links and if it finds any, it should notify you
- Go to Link Checker > Broken Links to see how many problematic links were found on your site. You can see dead link URLs, link status, anchor text of the dead link, and source of the dead link.
- Fix the broken link by doing one of the following:
- Edit URL = Here you can change the URL that this links to. You may also look the the "Source" column to see which page or post the broken link is on.
- Unlink = This means, remove the URL
- Not broken = Mark the link as not broken (for example, if it links to a Google Drive link that was not able to be checked properly)
- Dismiss = Ignore this broken link
- Recheck = once you've fixed it, use this to recheck the link.
- Ideally, there should be zero broken links.
If you need further help, please get in touch.