How to Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Website (2026 Guide)

Broken links are the most over-hyped problem in SEO. They are also the easiest one to actually fix.

I run technical SEO audits, and broken links turn up on nearly every one. The panic around them is misplaced.

A 404 page is not going to sink your rankings. I will show you why, straight from Google.

What broken links do cost you is real. It is just not what most guides claim.

So here is the honest version: what actually matters, the five tools I use to find them, and how to fix each one properly, including the one fix nearly every guide skips.

Do broken links actually hurt SEO?

Here is the part that will save you a lot of needless worry. Google has said for over a decade that 404 errors are a normal part of the web and are not a negative ranking signal. They do not, by themselves, push your site down.

It gets better. Google treats a 404 as a signal not to crawl that URL again, so dead pages do not waste your crawl budget either. The "broken links eat your crawl budget" line you have read a hundred times is mostly a myth.

So why fix them at all? Three real reasons, none of them "Google will punish you":

• User experience. A reader who hits a dead page leaves. That is a lost visitor, a lost sale, a lost subscriber.
• Stranded link equity. Internal links pointing at your own dead pages pass their value into a wall.
• Wasted backlinks. This is the big one. When another site links to a page on yours that now 404s, that backlink's authority is leaking away. A single redirect reclaims it.

Fix broken links for those three reasons, not because a 404 counter is dragging your rankings. It is not.

The three kinds of broken link, in order of value

Before you fire up a tool, know what you are hunting, because the payoff differs wildly.

1. Broken backlinks (an external site links to a dead URL on yours). The highest value. You reclaim real link equity with one 301.
2. Broken internal links (your pages link to your own dead pages). Quick wins for user experience and internal link flow.
3. Broken outbound links (you link to a dead external page). Lowest SEO stakes, but a credibility and reader-experience fix.

Most guides treat all three the same. They are not. Work top-down, highest value first.

5 ways to find broken links on your website

Each tool finds a different slice of the problem. No single one catches everything, so I use them in layers.

Method 1

01

Google Search Console

Best for: The 404s Google has already found on your own site, for free.

Start here, always. It is free, it is your own data, and it shows you the dead URLs Google has actually tried to crawl.

Open the Pages report (under Indexing) and look at "Not found (404)". That is your list of dead pages Google knows about. The Links report also shows your top linked pages, useful for spotting which dead URLs have external links worth reclaiming.

The catch: it only covers URLs Google has crawled, not a live crawl of every link on your site, and the data lags by a few days. It finds dead pages, not every broken link sitting in your content. Pair it with a crawler.

Open Search Console (free) →

Method 2

02

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Best for: A full crawl of internal and outbound links on a small-to-medium site.

This is the workhorse. It crawls your site like Googlebot and reports the HTTP status of every link it finds, internal and outbound.

Run a crawl, then filter Response Codes to Client Error (4xx). Use the "Inlinks" panel to see exactly which pages contain each broken link, so you know where to fix it. It catches the broken links buried in your content that Search Console never will.

The catch: the free version caps at 500 URLs (plenty for a small site), it is a desktop app, and it has a small learning curve. For a large site you need the paid licence.

Get Screaming Frog (free) →

Method 3

03

Ahrefs or Semrush

Best for: Finding broken backlinks and reclaiming lost link equity.

This is the only way to find the highest-value broken links: the ones where other sites point at your dead pages. Search Console hints at it; these tools nail it.

In Ahrefs, the Site Explorer "Best by links" report filtered to 404s shows your dead pages sorted by how many backlinks they have. In Semrush, the Site Audit and Backlink Audit do the same. Redirect those, and you recover authority you did not know you were losing.

The catch: both are paid subscriptions and overkill if you just want to tidy a small blog. But for reclaiming link equity, nothing else comes close.

Try Semrush →

Method 4

04

Online link checkers

Best for: A quick, no-install scan of a small site.

When you just want a fast answer and do not want to install anything, a browser-based checker does the job. Paste a URL and it lists every link and its status, colour-coded.

Dr. Link Check and Dead Link Checker crawl a small site for you and are genuinely useful for a single page or a small blog. To check the status of a specific list of URLs, say, to verify a batch of fixes, httpstatus.io is the cleanest.

The catch: they are slow on large sites, crawl less deeply than Screaming Frog, and they only find links, they do not help you fix them. Treat them as a spot-check, not an audit.

Open Dr. Link Check (free) →

Method 5

05

A WordPress plugin (for ongoing monitoring)

Best for: Hands-off, continuous broken-link monitoring on a WordPress site.

The tools above are point-in-time scans. If you are on WordPress and want broken links flagged automatically as they happen, a plugin watches for you.

Broken Link Checker is the best-known, and it now runs the heavy scanning on its own cloud rather than your server.

The catch: the old local-scanning version was a notorious server hog that could slow your whole site, so use the cloud-powered mode, not the legacy local scan. On a big site, a scheduled crawl is still gentler than any always-on plugin.

Get Broken Link Checker (free) →

Which tool should you use?

For most sites the combination is simple: Search Console plus Screaming Frog for your own site, Ahrefs or Semrush for your backlinks.

How to fix broken links the right way

Finding them is the easy half. Fixing them well is where people go wrong.

The mistake is always the same: one blunt tool for every case.

Match the fix to the cause.

• The page moved or was renamed → 301 redirect the old URL to the new one. This is the only fix that passes the page's link signals to the new URL, so backlinks and rankings follow.
• A link points to the wrong place (a typo, an old path) → update the link to the correct live URL. Simpler and cleaner than a redirect when you control the link.
• The target is gone for good with no replacement → remove the link, or for an outbound link, point it at an archive.org snapshot or a better current source.
• A dead page still gets traffic or has backlinks → restore it or 301 it to the closest equivalent. Do not let a page with real links keep 404ing.

And the one rule that matters most:

Never blanket-redirect every broken URL to your homepage. Google treats an irrelevant homepage redirect as a soft 404, which passes no link equity and frustrates the visitor. Redirect to the most relevant live page, or let it 404 cleanly if there is genuinely no good match. A clean 404 beats a misleading redirect.

On WordPress specifically, you do not need to touch .htaccess for any of this. Set up your 301s with the free Redirection plugin, or with Rank Math or Yoast SEO Premium if you already run one of those. Fix the internal links inside the post editor, and let the redirect plugin handle the moved and deleted URLs. I have written up all three ways, plugin, .htaccess and code, in how to redirect a WordPress page. To find the broken internal links and orphan pages in the first place, a plugin like Link Whisper scans your site and reports them.

The fix most guides skip: reclaim your broken backlinks

If you do nothing else from this guide, do this.

Pull your dead pages sorted by backlinks (Ahrefs "Best by links" filtered to 404, or Semrush's backlink audit). Each of those is a page that another site once thought was worth linking to, and now that link points at nothing.

A single 301 from that dead URL to the closest live page recovers the link equity that backlink was leaking. I have seen this move rankings on its own, because you are not building new links, you are switching back on the ones you already earned.

It is the highest return-on-effort fix in technical SEO, and almost nobody does it.

How to stop broken links piling up

A one-time clean-up is worth little if the same mess rebuilds in six months. A few habits keep it under control:

• Redirect when you change a URL, every time. The moment you rename or delete a page, add the 301. Most broken internal links are self-inflicted slug changes. Deciding whether that page should be deleted at all is a separate judgement, and I walk through it in content pruning.
• Re-crawl on a schedule. A monthly Screaming Frog run or a Search Console check catches new 404s before they age.
• Be careful with outbound links. The web rots; pages you linked to years ago die. Spot-check your most-trafficked posts.
• Fix internal links at the source. When you update a link, change it in the content, do not just redirect around it. Redirect chains pile up the same way broken links do.

Final take

Broken links are worth fixing, just not for the reason most people think.

A 404 will not hurt your rankings.

But the stranded link equity, the lost readers, and above all the backlinks pointing at your dead pages are real money left on the table. Find them with Search Console and a crawler, reclaim the ones with backlinks using a 301, and keep it tidy with a monthly re-crawl.

Do that, and broken links go from a vague worry to a ten-minute maintenance job, and a genuine technical SEO win hiding in plain sight.