A broken link is a link that goes nowhere. A customer taps "Our services", or a button in an old blog post, or a link someone shared on Facebook two years ago, and instead of your page they get an error. Usually it says "page not found", sometimes just "404", sometimes something stranger.
Almost every website that has been around for a few years has some. The question is how many, and where.
How a site ends up with them
Nobody breaks links on purpose. They pile up in ordinary ways:
Pages get renamed or removed. You stopped offering a service, so the page went. But the menu, the homepage and three old posts still point at it.
The site was rebuilt. The new site has different page addresses, and nobody connected the old ones to the new ones. Every link to the old site, from Google, from other websites, from your own emails, now ends in an error. This is the most damaging way to collect broken links, because it happens all at once. If you are weighing one up, refresh or rebuild helps you tell which your site actually needs.
Things you linked to moved. A supplier changed their website, a council page was retired, an online form you linked to was taken down.
Buttons were never finished. A "coming soon" page, a "book now" button that was meant to be connected later, a link that was only ever a placeholder.
Why they matter
Customers read them as neglect. One broken link is forgivable. A few in a row and the visitor starts to wonder whether you are still trading. Why visitors leave without calling explains how quickly small signs like this add up.
They break the paths that make you money. The links most likely to break are often the important ones: a booking button pointing at an old system, a quote form that was moved, a services page someone renamed. A broken link there is a lost enquiry.
Google has to work harder to understand your site. Search engines find your pages by following links. Dead ends waste that effort and make the site look poorly kept. Why your website is not showing up on Google covers the wider picture.
Old shared links keep getting clicked. A post you shared in 2021 can still bring visitors today. If the page it points to is gone, every one of those visitors lands on an error.
How to tell if you have a problem
You do not need special tools to get a feel for it. Open your site on your phone and spend five minutes clicking around like a customer would:
- Every item in the menu.
- Every button on the homepage.
- The links in your footer.
- Your booking, quote or contact buttons, all the way through.
- A few of your older pages or posts.
If everything works, good. If you hit even one error on the main paths, there are almost certainly more you have not found, because the links you clicked are the ones that get looked at most.
Why fixing them is not just deleting them
The tempting answer is to delete the broken link and move on. Sometimes that is right. Often it is not, because a dead page may still have visitors arriving from Google or from other websites, and deleting the link on your side does nothing for them.
Doing it properly means working out where each dead end should lead now, which pages still earn traffic, and which broken buttons sit on the paths customers actually use. That is judgement as much as tidying, and it is part of every site we build: every broken link and dead page fixed before handover.
Our free health check is a good place to start. If you found broken links on your own walk around, tell us about your business and we will tell you how deep the problem goes and what it would take to sort out.