Broken Links: How They Sneak In and How to Catch Them
August 14, 2026 · 2 min read
Nobody deliberately links to a page that doesn't exist. Broken links accumulate through entirely ordinary site maintenance — a page gets renamed, a product gets discontinued, an external site you linked to years ago restructures its URLs — and each of those individually reasonable changes leaves behind a dead link somewhere else on your site that nobody remembers to update.
Internal broken links vs. external broken links
Internal broken links — links to your own pages that no longer exist — are the more urgent category, because they're fully within your control to fix and they directly break navigation for a visitor trying to move around your own site. These usually trace back to a page being renamed, merged into another page, or deleted without every inbound link being found and updated.
External broken links — links out to other sites that have since moved or gone offline — are lower-stakes for navigation (a visitor leaving your site to a dead page is disappointing but not catastrophic) but they're a quieter trust signal. A visitor who clicks an external link and lands on a 404 forms a small, cumulative impression that the site wasn't well maintained, even though the failure technically wasn't yours.
Where they cluster
A few spots are disproportionately likely to accumulate broken links over time: older blog posts linking to resources that have since moved, footer navigation that rarely gets full attention during redesigns, and any page referencing a specific product, team member, or service that has since been discontinued or changed without every reference being tracked down.
The fix isn't always "delete the link"
When you find a broken internal link, the right fix is usually a redirect from the old URL to wherever that content now lives — not just deleting the reference and hoping nobody notices. A redirect preserves whatever value that URL had accumulated (links from other sites, direct bookmarks, search rankings) and gets a visitor to the right place instead of a dead end. Deleting the reference without a redirect is the easier fix in the moment and the worse one in the long run.
