A visitor clicks a link on your site. Instead of the page they expected, they get a 404. They hesitate for half a second, hit the back button, and leave. You'll never know it happened.
Now multiply that by every broken link sitting on pages you published a year ago, two years ago, five years ago. Links to articles you've since deleted. Links to external sites that quietly shut down. Links to images that never made it through your last migration.
This is the quiet tax broken links charge on your site, paid in lost traffic, lost rankings, and lost trust. The good news: finding and fixing them is straightforward once you know where to look. This guide walks through exactly how.
What counts as a broken link?
A broken link is any hyperlink that doesn't lead to a working page. Most commonly that means a 404 (page not found), but it also covers 410s (gone permanently), 500-level server errors, redirect loops, and broken images that fail to load.
There are two flavors to care about:
- Internal broken links point from one page on your site to another page on your site that no longer exists or has moved.
- External broken links point from your site to a third-party URL that's been removed, restructured, or taken offline.
Both hurt, but internal ones are more urgent. They're entirely your responsibility to fix, they bleed link equity within your own site, and they tell search engines your site isn't being maintained.
Why broken links matter more than you think
They quietly hurt your SEO
Every broken internal link wastes a bit of Google's crawl budget. Worse, links pointing to dead pages can't pass authority, so any backlinks pointing to a now-404'd URL are essentially wasted. Industry audits consistently find that around 4 in 10 websites have broken internal links. That's not a niche problem; it's a default state if you don't actively manage it.
They tank user experience
Bounce rate goes up. Average session duration goes down. Conversions drop because the user's journey hits a dead end exactly when you needed them moving forward. Few things kill trust faster than clicking "Read more" and landing on a 404.
They make you look careless
This one's underrated. If a customer is evaluating your business and clicks a broken link in your portfolio, pricing page, or case studies, what does that say? Sites with obvious, visible decay signal a business that isn't paying attention. The same applies to typos and missing images. Small details add up.
Common reasons links break
Broken links aren't a sign of negligence. They're a sign that your site has evolved. Common culprits:
- Pages get deleted without a redirect set up
- URLs get restructured during a redesign or CMS migration
- External sites you linked to go offline, change domains, or restructure
- Typos in hand-coded HTML or rich-text editors
- Products or services get discontinued and their pages removed
- Blog posts get consolidated or pruned
Every one of those is normal. The problem isn't that links break, it's that no one notices until a customer does.
How to find broken links on your website
There are a handful of ways to scan for broken links, ranging from free and manual to fully on-demand. The right choice depends on how big your site is and how often you want to check.
1. Google Search Console (free)
Start here. If you've verified your site, Search Console already knows about most of your 404s.
Open Search Console, go to Pages, and look under "Why pages aren't indexed" for the Not found (404) category. Click through to see the list of URLs Google has tried to crawl and failed.
Strengths: free, accurate, shows you the URLs Google actually cares about.
Weaknesses: only flags links Google has crawled, doesn't tell you where on your site they're being linked from, and you have to interpret the report yourself.
2. Free browser extensions
For a quick check of a single page, extensions like Check My Links or Broken Link Checker for Chrome will scan the current page and highlight any broken links in red. Useful for spot-checking a landing page before a campaign.
Strengths: instant, free, no setup.
Weaknesses: only checks the page you're currently on. Useless for site-wide audits.
3. Free online checkers
Sites like brokenlinkcheck.com and Dr. Link Check's free tier let you enter a URL and crawl your site for broken links without installing anything.
Strengths: covers more pages than an extension, no install.
Weaknesses: free tiers usually cap the number of pages or links checked, and the reports tend to be bare-bones.
4. Dedicated SEO crawlers
Tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, and SE Ranking crawl your entire site and produce detailed reports: broken links, redirect chains, missing titles, and a lot more.
Strengths: thorough, professional-grade output, lots of additional SEO data.
Weaknesses: steeper learning curve, paid past a certain site size, and someone has to learn the tool, run the crawl, and dig through a dense report.
5. On-demand quality controllers
This is the category that solves the actual problem: you want to run a thorough scan when it matters, before a launch, after a migration, ahead of a campaign, and get a clear report of what's broken without spending an afternoon configuring a crawler.
Steterly is built for this. You can start with a free scan (up to 50 pages, no credit card required) that covers broken links, dead images, placeholder text, speed, and missing meta tags. It checks every anchor on every page, follows redirect chains to the end, retries on rate-limits, and tells you exactly which page each broken link lives on. It does the same for the other six things that quietly rot on a website: typos, dead images, outdated copyright years, placeholder text like "lorem ipsum" or "your@email.com", missing meta titles and descriptions, and Core Web Vitals issues.
Strengths: thorough, focused output, free to start, scan when you actually need to.
Weaknesses: paid plans (starting at $9/month) needed for AI proofreading, larger sites, or scanning multiple sites.
How to fix broken links once you find them
What you do depends on the type of broken link.
Internal broken links
You have three options:
- Restore the page if it was deleted by mistake.
- Update the link to point to the correct current URL.
- Set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the closest relevant live page. This preserves any link equity from external sites still pointing at the old URL.
The 301 redirect is usually the best move when a page has been permanently removed but had inbound links or traffic. Don't redirect everything to your homepage, that's treated as a soft 404 by Google. Redirect to the most relevant replacement.
External broken links
You can't fix someone else's site, but you can fix your reference to it:
- Replace the link with a working source that covers the same topic.
- Remove the link entirely and leave the anchor text as plain text.
- Point to an archived version via the Wayback Machine if the original content is irreplaceable.
Broken images
Either re-upload the image to your media library and update the reference, or replace it with a working asset. While you're there, check the alt text. Broken images and missing alt text often travel together, and both hurt accessibility and SEO.
Broken backlinks pointing to your site
This is the hidden opportunity. If another site links to a URL on your site that no longer exists, that's wasted link equity. Set up a 301 redirect from the dead URL to the most relevant live page on your site and you reclaim it. Tools like Ahrefs or Google Search Console can show you which external sites are linking to dead pages.
Don't have time to fix them yourself?
Finding broken links is the easy part. Fixing dozens of them across an old site, updating links, setting redirects, replacing images, rewriting anchor text, takes time most teams don't have.
How to stop broken links from coming back
Finding and fixing them once is satisfying. Doing it every month forever is not. A few habits make the problem mostly go away:
- Always set up a redirect when you delete or move a page. This is the single biggest source of internal broken links. Make it a non-negotiable step in your publishing workflow.
- Audit at the moments that matter. Before a launch, after a migration, before a big campaign, and at a regular cadence: monthly for active sites, quarterly for slower ones.
- Run a thorough scan rather than a shallow one. A dedicated quality controller like Steterly checks every anchor on every page and follows redirect chains to the end, so you're not just catching the obvious 404s.
- Document your URL structure so future redesigns don't accidentally orphan dozens of pages.
- Be conservative with external links. The more outbound links you have to small or new sites, the more rot you'll have to deal with later. Link to sources likely to be around in five years.
Frequently asked questions
Do broken links hurt SEO?
Yes, but indirectly. A single broken link won't tank your rankings. A site full of them will. They waste crawl budget, signal poor quality, and prevent link equity from flowing through your internal link structure.
How often should I check for broken links?
For active sites that publish regularly, monthly. For static or slow-moving sites, quarterly. Always run an extra scan before a launch, after a CMS migration, or before a major campaign. Those are the moments broken links are most likely to appear and most likely to cost you.
What's the difference between a 404 and a soft 404?
A 404 returns a proper "not found" status code from the server. A soft 404 returns a 200 ("OK") status code but actually shows a "page not found" message, usually because someone redirects all missing pages to the homepage. Google treats soft 404s as broken pages too, and they're harder to spot.
Can broken links get my site penalized by Google?
Not directly. Google doesn't issue manual penalties for broken links. But they degrade the signals Google uses to rank you, like crawl efficiency, user experience metrics, and perceived site quality. The effect is real even if it's not labeled a "penalty."
Should I fix every broken link?
Prioritize. Fix internal broken links and broken links on high-traffic pages first. External broken links on old, low-traffic content can wait. Don't burn a week chasing every dead link on a blog post no one reads.
What's the best free broken link checker?
For a one-off scan, Google Search Console (for known 404s) plus a free online checker like brokenlinkcheck.com covers most use cases. Free tools run out of room quickly on bigger sites, and they tend to give you raw lists rather than a usable report. That's where a dedicated tool pays for itself, though you can also start with Steterly's free scan (up to 50 pages, no credit card) to get a proper report before deciding whether to upgrade.
Catch the slips before your visitors do
Broken links, dead images, typos, missing SEO tags: none of them announce themselves. They sit quietly until a customer, a journalist, or a search engine finds them first. The fastest way to stop that is to run a thorough scan at the moments that matter, and act on what comes back.
Steterly is the quality controller for that job. Start with a free scan (no credit card required), get a clear report of what needs your attention, and fix it.