Links break on their own. A page gets renamed, a product is removed, a site you linked to years ago shuts down, and nothing announces any of it. The owner rarely clicks their own links, so the first person to find a dead one is usually a visitor who then leaves.
Knowing how to find broken links on your website is a twenty-minute job the first time and a five-minute one after that.
The two kinds, and why they are different problems
Internal links point at your own pages. When one breaks it is usually because you renamed or deleted something. These are entirely your problem, entirely fixable, and they matter most — a visitor following your own navigation into a dead end has been let down by you specifically.
External links point at somebody else’s site. They break when that site changes or disappears, which you cannot control and cannot prevent. They matter less to a visitor and are worth reviewing rather than chasing.
Fix all the internal ones. Review the external ones occasionally and be relaxed about it.
How to find them
A crawler is the practical answer. The quickest way to find broken links WordPress has accumulated is to let a tool request every one of them. A tool that requests every link on the site and reports what came back will find in minutes what you would never find by clicking. Our own broken link checker does this in the browser, and there are desktop crawlers that go deeper on large sites.
Search Console shows you a different list, and a more valuable one. Its coverage report tells you which broken URLs Google actually tried to fetch — which usually means somebody linked to them or they were once indexed. A dead URL nobody visits matters far less than one Google keeps returning to.
Your own 404 log is the best source of all if you have one. It tells you what real visitors asked for and did not get, which is the only list ordered by actual impact.
Read the results properly
A crawler will flag things that are not broken, and treating every red line as a fault wastes an afternoon.
403 is not 404. Some sites deliberately block automated requests. The link works perfectly in a browser and the crawler is simply not welcome. Always open a flagged link yourself before deleting it.
Slow is not dead. A site that took too long to answer gets reported as an error. Try it again later.
Redirect chains are worth noticing. Not broken, but a link that passes through three redirects to arrive somewhere is worth pointing straight at the destination.
The links you cannot see from your own site
A crawler only follows links that exist on your pages. It cannot tell you about links pointing at pages of yours that no longer exist, and those are often the more valuable ones — somebody wrote about you, linked to a page, and that page has since moved.
Search Console is the only free way to see these. A URL appearing as an error with referring pages listed means an external site is sending people to an address you deleted. Redirecting it to the closest live page recovers traffic you were already losing silently, and it takes a minute.
This is worth checking after any redesign, when a batch of old addresses stops existing all at once.
What to do with each one
- The page moved. Update the link, and put a redirect from the old address to the new one so anybody else’s link keeps working too.
- The page is gone and something similar exists. Point the link at the closest equivalent, not at the homepage. A visitor sent to the homepage from a specific link has to start their search again.
- The page is gone and nothing replaces it. Remove the link and keep the sentence. Leaving a dead link because the text reads well is a false economy.
- An external site has disappeared. Remove it, or replace it with a live source that makes the same point.
The largest batch of broken links a site ever produces arrives on the day a redesign goes live — fixing 404s after a redesign is that specific job.
Why this is a maintenance job rather than a one-off
Every content change creates the possibility of a new one. Rename a service page and every old link to it breaks at once. Delete a product and any post that mentioned it now points nowhere. The list is never finished, which is precisely why it belongs on a schedule rather than on a to-do list.
Quarterly suits most sites. After a redesign or a URL change, do it immediately — that is when the largest batch appears, and our guide on what to check in a website redesign covers the rest of that moment.
Regular link checks are one of the smaller items in a maintenance plan and one of the easiest to see the value of, because the fix is always visible and always finished.