If you own a website, providing a fantastic user experience should be one of your top concerns. Broken links, however, are a huge inconvenience that can get in the way. You’ll have to deal with them eventually if you want to keep your website in good shape. In this article, we’ll dive into what broken links are and how to discover and how to remove broken links on your website.
WHAT ARE BROKEN LINKS?
A broken link is a web page that a user can’t find or access for a variety of reasons. When a user tries to visit a broken link, web servers frequently produce an error message. “Dead links” or “link rots” are other terms for broken links.
In simple words, links that lead to pages that do not exist are known as broken links. When you click on a broken link, you’ll be taken to a 404 error page.
HOW TO FIND BROKEN LINKS?
The simplest and quickest way to see whether you have any broken links is to use the broken link checker tool. Enter your URL and find the broken links.
If your site has hundreds of pages or articles, you can use a tool like SEOptimer’s DIY SEO to crawl all of them for broken links, or you may use a plugin for your CMS platform to do it for you.
HOW TO REMOVE BROKEN LINKS?
Although WordPress does not have an out-of-the-box solution for redirecting broken links, there are alternatives for fixing them and redirecting them to a new page.
To avoid difficulties, you should install Simple 301 Redirect for WordPress if your site has hundreds of pages.
Else, once you’ve detected a broken internal link, simply hover over each URL and select Edit Link. You can either see suggestions for what link to replace it with or you can find your own, and then click Update. If you’d prefer to remove the link entirely, you can choose Unlink.
Because Broken Link Checker searches your site on a regular basis, you only need to check this screen from time to time to ensure that your links are working properly.
WRAPPING UP:
Broken links on your website, in essence, point to resources that are no longer available, either within or externally. When they persist, they cause tremendous inconvenience to your site visitors. This is why you must act quickly to fix them. Too many broken links can kill your SEO. The time and effort you put into maintaining your links isn’t just improving your site. It’s laying the groundwork for a valuable visitor experience.
