How to find broken links on your site

Before you start

• A link checker or crawler

The steps

1. 1

   Step 1: Crawl the whole site

   Following internal links and recording the status of every outbound link.

2. 2

   Step 2: Separate internal from external

   Internal 404s are your fault and your fix; external ones need a judgement call.

3. 3

   Step 3: Fix internal 404s first

   Correct the link, or add a redirect if the target genuinely moved.

4. 4

   Step 4: Check redirect chains

   An internal link to a URL that redirects should point at the destination directly.

5. 5

   Step 5: Handle external breakage

   Find the current address, link to the Wayback Machine, or remove the link and keep the citation as text.

6. 6

   Step 6: Check Search Console

   The Pages report lists 404s that Google found, including ones nothing on your site links to.

7. 7

   Step 7: Automate it

   A link check in your build or a monthly scheduled run. Manual checking stops after the first month.

Why internal 404s are worse than they look

They waste crawl budget, they break the path a reader was following, and they signal a site nobody tends. A single broken link in main navigation can orphan a whole section.

Handling transient failures

A checker with no retry logic reports timeouts as broken links. Retry with backoff before believing a failure — this site’s link checker makes three attempts, because four working client sites were once reported dead by a single-attempt run.

Check the links pointing at you too

Search Console's Pages report lists 404s that other sites link to, which are worth more than your internal ones — someone has already given you a link and it is landing nowhere. A redirect from that URL to the closest live equivalent recovers the value in one line of configuration, and it is the cheapest link acquisition available to any site.

The background behind this

Website maintenance: the routine that prevents silent failure covers the reasoning in about 4 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.

Who wrote this

Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Pakistan. These procedures are the ones I run on client work, written down rather than invented — including the ones where the honest answer is that the fix is not available on your current hosting.