Let me pop the hood on something most business owners never look at: what actually happens when a link on their site points to nothing. A visitor clicks, gets a dead page, and leaves. No error, no complaint, just a quiet click away from your business. Nobody reports it. It just sits there costing you.
Multiply that by every old blog post, every partner site that’s since moved, every menu link left over from your last redesign, and you’ve got a slow leak. It doesn’t show up in any report you’re already checking.
Here’s the checklist we run for clients, and you can run the whole thing yourself in under an hour.
Why a broken link costs more than a click
A single dead link isn’t a crisis. A pattern of them is. Search engines crawl your site the same way a visitor does, and when they hit dead ends repeatedly, it signals a site that isn’t being maintained. That can quietly drag down how your pages get ranked, on top of the visitors you’re already losing in the moment.
Think of it like a storefront with a few burned out light bulbs. One doesn’t matter. A dozen and people start wondering if you’re still open.
The three places broken links hide
In almost every audit we run, dead links show up in the same three spots.
- Old blog posts. Articles from a year or two ago that link to a page, product, or offer you’ve since taken down.
- External links. You linked out to a supplier, a news article, or a partner’s site, and that page moved or the business closed.
- Leftover internal links. Your last redesign renamed or removed pages, and nobody went back through the old content to update what pointed at them.
That third one is the most common, and the easiest to fix once you know where to look.
What this looks like on a real site
A few examples from audits we’ve actually run, so this isn’t abstract. A dentist’s site had four blog posts linking to an insurance page that got folded into a general services page two redesigns ago, every one of those links still pointed to the old address. An HVAC company had a “spring tune-up special” post from three years back linking to a coupon page that no longer existed, still showing up in Google for anyone searching that exact promotion. A landscaping site had an embedded Google Map pointing at a job site address from a project they finished in 2022, technically not a broken link, but the same kind of forgotten clutter that makes a site feel unattended.
None of these were dramatic. Nobody was going to email the owner about them. They just sat there, quietly making the site look a little less cared for than the business actually was.
How to run the check, step by step
You don’t need a developer for this part.
- Pick a free broken link checker tool (a quick search turns up several solid options) and enter your homepage address.
- Let it crawl the site. Depending on how many pages you have, this takes anywhere from a couple of minutes to about twenty.
- Export or view the list of broken links it finds, along with the page each one lives on.
- Sort the list by how important the page is. A dead link on your homepage matters more than one buried in a five-year-old post.
- Work through the list from most to least important, fixing or redirecting as you go.
That’s the whole process. No code required for the first four steps.
Fix it or redirect it, here’s how to decide
Once you’ve got your list, each broken link falls into one of two buckets.
The destination still exists, it just moved. Update the link to point to the new address. This is the simple fix, usually just editing the page in your site’s admin.
The destination is gone for good. Set up a redirect instead, sending visitors, and search engines, to the closest relevant page you still have. A redirect takes a few minutes to set up and quietly solves the problem going forward, instead of just for the one link you happened to catch.
Either option beats leaving a visitor stuck looking at an error page, wondering if they typed something wrong.
Mistakes that make the problem worse
A few things we see owners do that turn a small cleanup into a bigger one.
- Deleting a page without checking what links to it. Before you remove any page, search your own site for other pages linking to it. Otherwise you just created a new broken link on purpose.
- Redirecting everything to the homepage. It’s tempting to point every dead link at your homepage and call it done. Visitors and search engines both prefer a redirect that lands somewhere actually related to what they clicked.
- Only checking pages you remember exist. Most owners can name their five main pages from memory. The broken links are almost always hiding in the twenty or thirty pages they forgot were ever published.
Make it a five-minute habit, not a one-time fix
This is where most owners fall off. They run the check once, feel good about it, and never run it again. Six months later the same problems have quietly come back, plus a few new ones.
I coach my kid’s Saturday soccer team, and the way I explain budgets to a nine-year-old works here too: if you buy a juice box and let it sit out all week, it’s not a juice box anymore, it’s a mess. A broken link check is the same. Run it once a quarter, put it on a calendar reminder, and it stays a five-minute task instead of turning into a weekend project.
If a broader look at search performance is on your list too, that’s part of what a proper SEO checkup covers, broken links included.
One more thing while we’re here: don’t confuse “no broken links” with “the site is working.” A page can load fine and still not do its job. We see plenty of pages with a clean bill of health on this front and zero real conversions, meaning actual calls and form fills, not just clicks on a button that goes nowhere. That’s a different checklist for a different day.
The move: pick one free broken link checker, run it against your site this week, and fix the top five things it finds.
Want your site regularly checked for issues like this? That’s exactly what our website care plans cover.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I check my site for broken links?
Once a quarter is enough for most small business sites. If you publish new content weekly or just finished a redesign, check monthly for the first few months, then settle back into a quarterly habit.
Do broken links actually hurt my Google ranking?
A handful here and there won’t sink you, but a pattern of them signals a site that isn’t maintained, and that can affect how search engines evaluate and rank your pages over time.
What’s the difference between fixing a link and redirecting it?
Fixing means updating the link to point to the correct, still-existing page. Redirecting means the original page is gone for good, so you send visitors to the next best page automatically instead of leaving them at a dead end.
