How to Find and Fix Broken Links in WordPress
Website links play a crucial role in every successful SEO strategy. That’s why it’s highly important that you distribute both external and internal links throughout your site and properly implement them into your website’s navigation system. Of course, you should also make sure to set up a solid permalink structure of your pages, posts, and any other custom post types in a way that is both SEO and user-friendly.
That being said, if one of your links (or multiple links, for that matter) isn’t working properly, all the above-mentioned efforts could be in vain. Having broken links can cause significant damage to your SEO and the user-friendliness of your WordPress site as a whole, which is why it’s imperative to find out if there are any links with errors and then to properly fix them.
Luckily, finding and fixing broken links in WordPress is quite easy to do with the help of the right tools. And in this article, we are going to present you with some of the best ones and show you detailed instructions on how you can find and fix your broken links using the help of said tools. We are also going to talk a bit about broken links in general as well explain how they can harm your site, so make sure to read on:
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Simply put, broken links (or dead links) represent links that have stopped working, for one reason or another. For example, a broken link in WordPress can occur if you’ve moved your site to another location (with a new domain name) or if a certain page or post no longer exists (or it is not redirected properly). This results in a server showing a 404 error (otherwise known as “page not found”). In some cases, a simple typing error can result in a broken link.
Not only can broken links ruin the user experience of your site visitors, but they can also hurt your overall SEO rankings. It’s quite simple – if users click on links they are interested in and end up on a 404 page error, they may get annoyed and decide to flee your site for good, which can lead to higher bounce rates.
Moreover, having outbound broken links on your site can also impact your link equity (or link juice). Namely, search engine crawlers collect page data to determine the authority of a page and thus rank it accordingly. Therefore, it’s safe to say that having a broken outbound link can easily result in a lower ranking of your site.
To avoid running into all these problems, you must take care of both your internal and outbound links and fix all such links that are broken. This time around, we are going to show you how to find and fix broken links in WordPress using four different methods. These will include some of the best premium and free SEO tools such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console, as well as a popular plugin called Broken Link Checker.
Google Search Console is a great choice if you’re looking for a free tool that will allow you to easily find links that contain 404 errors.
First, log into your Google Search Console account. Then hit the Coverage button (located in the menu on the left side of the screen).
You will be able to find your 404 errors beneath the Excluded tab (or beneath the Errors tab). Just click on one of the two tabs and you will be able to see all the issues Google has found.
Click on Not Found (404) to learn what links are broken on your site.
Finally, make sure to hit the Export >> Download CSV button to download the list of all 404 errors. You will be able to use this to fix your broken links.
Ahrefs is a great SEO tool that contains many great options that will allow you to analyze your competition and perform complete keyword research to make the best keyword strategy for your site. On top of that, Ahrefs comes with a useful feature that will help you monitor your website’s health as well as create a full report on your broken links.
First things first, sign up to an Ahrefs account or log in to an existing one.
Then, after clicking on Site Explorer, insert your domain name and you will activate the crawling feature. This may take some time.
After the tool is finished crawling your site, you will get to see the results. Click on Pages >> Best by Links and select 404 status.
You will be able to export your report in CSV format to fix your site’s broken links.
SEMRush is another great SEO tool that will allow you to monitor your rankings and your overall link health status. You will be able to use their site audit tool that will be able to crawl your site with the purpose of finding any errors. Even though this is a paid type of service, you can also use the free SEMRush account. Still, this will have its limits, such as the ability to crawl only up to 100 pages on one domain name (the starting paid plan allows 100,000 pages on a monthly basis).
After logging into your SEMRush account, make sure to hit the Site Audit link located in the menu on the left side of the screen.
Once a Site Audit page opens, you will be able to click on the New Project button (located in the upper right corner of the screen) and add your site.
From then on, you will have to insert your domain and project name and click on Create project.
Then, it’s time to configure your site audit settings. You will be able to choose the number of pages you want the tool to crawl, and you will also be able to choose a crawl source. Then, hit the Start Site Audit button.
This will activate the crawling process. Depending on the number of pages you chose, this may take a few minutes.
After the process is done, you can feel free to choose your domain. You will see it under the Site Audit section. Click on your domain name and you will be able to see your report.
To check out all the links that are broken, you should click the link called Broken (in the Crawled Pages section).
Finally, hit the Export button located in the top right corner. This action will download the report that you will need to use when fixing the links that are broken on your WordPress site.
Last but not least, if you don’t want to use any of the tools we talked about above (for whatever reason), you can always find your broken links with the help of a WordPress plugin. A plugin called Broken Link Checker is a great choice as it allows you to easily monitor internal as well as external links on your site to determine whether there are any broken 404 error links.
After installing and activating the plugin, it will instantly start the process of searching for broken links among your posts, pages, comments, blogroll, and custom fields (which is optional).
To see the full report, head to Tools >> Broken Links.
Choose the Broken tab to see a list of your broken links, both internal and external.
Make sure that the Broken Link Checker plugin is active until you fix all the broken links on your site. After that, we advise you to deactivate the plugin for the time being so as to prevent your server from slowing down.
Now that you’ve checked out four different ways to find broken links on your WordPress site, it’s time to show you how you can fix them. By far, the best way to do so is to simply redirect your links to another page. Say that you’ve removed a page or post from your site completely. In that case, you might want to redirect your visitors to the page or post that is related to the old one in some way. Or, in case your content is now located on a different URL address, you simply need to redirect your page or post to the new one instead.
All this can be easily done by creating 301 redirects. We recommend using the Redirection plugin for this task as it is easy to use and comes with features that will allow you to set and manage your WordPress redirects in an effective and straightforward manner. You will also be able to keep track of 404 errors and use a configurable logging option that lets you view all redirects occurring on your site, including information about the visitor, the browser that was used, and the referrer.
After installing and activating the plugin, go to Tools >> Redirection to set up your redirects.
After going through a quick and intuitive setup process, go ahead and insert your old link (that is broken) into the “Source URL” field and then insert the new one into the field called “Target URL”.
Hit the Add Redirect button to store your settings.
Go ahead and test the redirects that you’ve set up by going to the old link. If you’ve added your new URL properly, you should be automatically redirected to the new page.
Simply do the same for all the other broken links that you have on your site.
Conclusion
As links represent key elements of every website, it’s extremely important to monitor their health and make sure they are fixed and properly redirected in case a 404 error has occurred. As you could see from all the steps we presented above, finding and fixing such links on your WordPress site is quite easy to do if you’re using the right tools. No matter if you want to use paid options such as SEMRush or Ahrefs, if you prefer a free option such as Google Search Console, or if you simply plan to use the help of a plugin, each of these tools will help you analyze the health of your links quickly and efficiently. Just follow the instructions of your preferred method carefully, and you’ll be able to fix all faulty links and help ensure that your SEO is as effective as it can be.
