Broken Link

A broken link is a link that leads nowhere. You click it and, instead of the page you wanted, you get a short message saying the page cannot be found. That message is a 404, named after the number the server sends back with it. Every website collects a few, and most owners never notice their own.

Links break for very ordinary reasons. Somebody renames a page and the old address stops working. A shop removes a product that sold out and forgets that three articles point at it. A supplier you linked to years ago closes down and takes its whole site with it. A menu is typed with one letter wrong. None of it is dramatic. It happens quietly, one page at a time, and it builds up.

Finding them costs nothing. Google Search Console lists the addresses Google tried and could not reach. A free crawling tool walks your site the way a visitor would and prints every dead link it meets. Your own server keeps a record of every 404 it has sent, and that list is the most useful of the three, because it only contains pages that real people asked for.

Now the part most people get wrong. A broken link is not always a mistake to repair. If a page moved, send visitors to its new address with a permanent redirect. If the page is truly gone and nothing replaced it, let it answer 404. Pushing every missing page to the home page looks tidy and is worse than doing nothing, because the visitor arrives somewhere unrelated and leaves.

The cost people do not expect arrives after a redesign. Rebuilding a site changes hundreds of addresses in one afternoon, and if nobody writes down which old address becomes which new one, years of search results stop working at the same moment. Linkysoft treats that list as part of a website design and development job rather than an extra, and it is a fair question to put to any supplier.

One habit is worth keeping. Give your 404 page a search box and a link back to the main sections, then check it yourself once a month. A shop running on Storek keeps a page for a discontinued product that says so and points at what replaced it. Broken links cost money in advertising too, since a paid click that lands on a 404 is money spent on nothing, and Linkysoft checks that before any digital marketing work begins.