Why they matter
- Visitors leave. A dead end at the moment someone is deciding to call you is the most expensive kind.
- Search engines notice. Google follows links to find and understand your pages. Links that lead nowhere waste that effort, and pages other sites link to lose the value of those links if they’ve disappeared.
- It looks neglected. A site with dead links feels unmaintained, and that rubs off on the business.
Where they come from
- Redesigns. The most common cause. New page addresses go live, the old ones vanish, and every link to them — from your own pages, from Google, from other sites — breaks at once.
- Deleted pages. An old service or a past promotion removed without a thought for the links pointing to it.
- Other sites changing. A supplier, an association or a news story you link to moves or disappears.
- Typos. A mistyped address in a menu or a button.
How to fix them
For your own pages that moved: add a permanent (301) redirect from the old address to the new one. Visitors and search engines are sent on automatically, and most of the old page’s search value goes with them. Don’t send everything to the home page — redirect each old page to its closest new match.
For links inside your site: update them to point straight at the right page, rather than relying on a redirect.
For links to other sites: update them to the new address, or remove them.
After a redesign: make a list of every old address before launch, map each to its new one, and test the redirects the day the new site goes live.
How to find them
You can’t fix what you can’t see, and on a site with more than a few pages, checking by hand isn’t realistic. Our site audit reads every page and checks every link and image on it, inside your site and out, and lists each broken one with the page it’s on. Or start with a free report.