How to Find and Fix Broken Links in WordPress

How to Find and Fix Broken Links in WordPress

Broken links are a common problem with websites. They can cause problems for your visitors and lower your search engine ranking. This is often an issue that escapes the attention of webmasters. If you have lots of content on your site, you may not even be aware that you have broken links.

There are ways to identify broken links and fix them. There are tools made specifically for WordPress that help you do this, as well as methods that can be used on any type of site. In this article we’ll be discussing some of the best ways to overcome this troublesome issue.

Check for broken links

What Are Broken Links and What Harm Do They Cause?

If you spend any time at all surfing the web, you’ve surely run into broken links. This is when you click on a link and it gives you an error message, such as a 404 error or a message saying “This page cannot be found” or something similar.

What causes broken links? There can be several causes.

  • The site or page you are linking to no longer exists
  • The URL of the page has changed
  • Incorrect link tags

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These are the most common causes of broken links. The problem is that if it’s on your site, you aren’t usually aware of it unless someone tells you. This isn’t likely, as most visitors aren’t going to take the trouble to email a you about a broken link, unless it’s a friend or associate! Oh, headache, what should you do to fix this problem?!

When a visitor encounters a broken link, he or she will probably look elsewhere for similar information. This is obviously not good for you, as it means you are losing traffic.

When search engine spiders find broken links, they will obviously not be indexing that page. Worst, it may cause them to consider the entire website less valuable. So broken links are bad news in every way, even for SEO!

Finding Broken Links

Identifying broken links is really your biggest challenge. Once you know that a link isn’t working properly, it’s not that hard to fix it. Since you don’t want to be spending your day manually checking out every link on your site, you will want to find some automated solutions. Let’s look at a few good ones.

  1. Broken Link Checker

    This is a WordPress plugin that will automatically check your content for any broken links. This way you’ll be notified as soon as any problems in this area occur.

    This is a free plugin that will ensure that you don’t have broken links anywhere on your site. You can choose to be notified by email or on your dashboard if any are found. When they are found, you can edit them from the plugin page without having to update each post.

    As of the time of writing, this WordPress plugin has over 1,600,000 downloads!

  2. Online Broken Link Checkers

    An even simpler way to find broken links is to use a free online link checker. A popular one is Link Valet.

    You simply type in your URL and Link Valet will check for any problems. You can choose to get a summary report or full report that will inform you of any broken links.

Always Verify that Links are Really Broken

One thing to remember is that it’s a good idea to manually check out if a link is really broken if one of these tools gives you a message. This is especially true of the free online link checkers.

Sometimes you may get a message due to temporary downtime on your site rather than an actual broken link.

How to Avoid Broken Links

It’s best to avoid broken links in the first place so you don’t have to fix them. There are a few ways to reduce the chances of having this problem.

  • If you are linking to other sites, always check them before inserting the link.
  • Avoid changing the URLs of your posts or pages.
  • Type your URL carefully and don’t make it bold or italicized – this can cause HTML problems.
  • When typing your URL, try to keep it all on one line – otherwise it may get cut off.
  • Check your links before saving an article or post.

These tips won’t necessarily prevent all broken links, but they can cut down on the problem. If you also use a link checking tool, you will then be covered.

Conclusion

Don’t Let Broken Links Reduce Your Site’s Value!

Broken links can reduce the value of your site, both in the eyes of visitors and the search engines. People surfing the web don’t usually have much patience, and if they can’t reach a certain page on your site they may assume the whole site is down.

This is also something that will undermine any SEO efforts you’re making. The above recommendations can help prevent and fix any broken links on your site. Using an automated tool can give you immediate alerts about broken links so you can fix them.

Larger websites in particular need to be careful about broken links, as the more content you have, the greater the chance of a broken link. This is not a difficult problem to fix, as long as you’re aware of it!

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