An Actionable Guide to Find and Fix Broken Links in WordPress

Managing and maintaining a WordPress site needs to be taken care of when you have your website live up and running. You need to ensure if all the links in the content of your web-pages works well on your WordPress site, or are they having some issues.

Let’s say suppose if a website visitor is reading a post and going through the things mentioned on your website, from links to the images.

To their surprise, they found that the link they clicked and the content they were looking for no longer exists!

This could be a downside for you as your site visitors might have a negative experience due to a broken link!

Because all that your website visitors can find after clicking the link can be a 404 page not found. So, why does that happen? What could be the legit reason behind that?

To deal with that, you need to maintain the health of your site, you need to replace any broken links on your website and ensure that your site visitors don’t hit any broken links.

So, this article will drive you to know why your site may have broken links and how to fix them up for your WordPress website.

Let’s Begin!

What are the Reasons for Getting Broken Links?

If you face the problem of having a broken link on your website then that means, you are leaving your website visitors with bad user experience (UX).

This means, the link your site visitors were expecting to see leads them to a 404 error page – A page that does not exist anymore!

This could be a serious drawback for you as your site visitors can directly turn down and leave your site instantly. You don’t want such a bottleneck to show up to your site visitors either!

Well, there could not be just one but instead, there could be many of the certain reasons that could result in a broken link. Here are some reasons that broken links can occur for:

• Due to URL change

One of the possible reasons for a broken link is the change in the URL. For some reason, due to changes in the URL path, the existing link can show a 404 error page.

• Page does not exist anymore

Sometimes the broken link or 404 page not an error occurs due to the deletion of the web-page for which if a visitor navigates to the deleted web-page link then they will end up with a 404 page not found error.

• Maybe the website moved to a New Domain

Another thing that could have happened for a URL as a broken link can be that the entire website might have moved to a new domain.

Drawbacks of checking Broken Links Manually

You always have the option to check the broken links on your WordPress site manually where you can find and fix them up with the manual method.

But doing so, you will ultimately end up utilizing a lot of time. This simply means, with the manual method, you need to go through all the pages and posts one after the other and fetch the broken links by checking every link.

Alternatively, there is an effective way to overcome the hurdle of finding and fixing the broken links – Other than the manual method.

Here’s the catch!

You can simply make use of the tools to automatically check and fix the broken links for your WordPress website. Further, we will move on to the variety of tools and WordPress plugins that can help you fetch the broken links and fix them up.

How to find and fix the broken links automatically in WordPress?

As broken links are bad for your WordPress site, you can fix the broken links with these useful automated tools and WordPress plugins.

• Google Search Console

Google Search Console is free of cost webmaster tool that can be used to keep your website healthy from where Google crawlers and spiders may find it easy to check the entire sitemap structure of your website.

With that being said, once you have set up the Google Search Console (GSC), then Google crawlers will automatically scan and check your site for the broken links and 404 page not found errors.

You can see the stats of your URL error report from the Crawl Stats report in Google Search Console. At there, you just need to click on the Crawl Errors that shows which pages link to 404 error page.

• W3C Link Checker

W3C Link Checker is a free and easy to use online tool that can help you to check the issues in links and anchors of your website.

All you need to do is to enter your website URL and click on the check button, after that this tool will automatically perform the check and find out the broken links along with the required actions needed.

• Broken Link Checker (WordPress Plugin)

Broken Link Checker is a free and popular WordPress plugin that can monitor links in your posts, pages, comments, and custom fields.

It can easily identify the links that don’t work from your WordPress website. Once you install and activate this plugin, it will automatically check for the broken links on your site.

If you want to check any broken link found by this plugin then you need to navigate to the Tools> Broken Links to see the list of broken links found.

Apart from that, you can select the link types to define which links to check.

Still, if you are looking for other resources for finding broken links in WordPress. Here is how you can easily find the broken links with these tools:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool

Screaming Frog SEO spider tool can be used to crawl more than 500 URLs for free. Once you install the desktop version of Screaming Frog SEO spider, then after installation you can simply enter your website URL, then you need to navigate to the Response Codes> Client Error (4xx) tab.

Doing so will let you view the source of the broken links simply by clicking the Inlinks tab.

You can also bulk export both broken links and source URLs from the Bulk Export tab.

Check my Links Chrome extension

Check My Links is an easy way to look out any broken link for a web-page on your website. However, with check my links Chrome browser extension; you can just check the broken links for the web-page of a website that you are looking into.

Final Thoughts

In the end, after going through the above-mentioned points, you can easily figure out the best way to deal with the broken links on your WordPress website.

As broken links are usually found on every site, but you can easily deal with that from the tools, WordPress plugins, and various other resources mentioned in this article. Hence, when you find and fix the broken links from your website, it can finally help you to enhance your visitor’s experience as well!

Any suggestions or questions from your side? Just ask us right away in the comment section below, we will help you out!