Broken Link

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

Links break for very ordinary reasons, usually because somebody renamed a page and the old address stopped working. Elsewhere a shop removes a product that sold out and forgets that three articles still point at it. A supplier you linked to years ago closes down and takes its whole site with it, or a menu word is typed with one letter wrong. None of it is dramatic, which is why it builds up so quietly, one page at a time.

Finding them costs nothing, because 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. The most useful list, though, is the record your own server keeps of every 404 it has sent, since it holds only pages that real people asked for.

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

The cost people do not expect arrives after a redesign, since rebuilding a site changes hundreds of addresses in one afternoon. 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 for any supplier.

One habit is worth keeping. Give your 404 page a search box and a link back to the main sections, then open 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, because a paid click that lands on a 404 buys nothing, and Linkysoft checks for them before any digital marketing work begins.