Information checked: 21 July 2026.
Broken links waste users’ time, hide maintenance problems and can prevent important pages or downloads from being discovered. Automated reports are useful, but every result needs context before a redirect or deletion is chosen.
In brief: Fix the source link and choose destination behaviour according to the missing page’s real replacement.
Check more than ordinary links
- Internal HTML links and navigation.
- Images, stylesheets, scripts and downloadable files.
- Canonical, alternate and structured-data URLs.
- Links inside PDFs or reusable content blocks where practical.
- Redirect chains, loops and links to retired staging hosts.
- External sources that have moved or changed purpose.
Choose the correct repair
Repair options for a broken destination
- Same content moved permanently
- Update internal links and use a direct permanent redirect
- Content merged into a genuinely equivalent page
- Redirect to the relevant merged destination
- Content intentionally removed with no replacement
- Remove the link and return an appropriate not-found or gone response
- Temporary external outage
- Wait, replace the source or add context
- Incorrect source URL
- Correct the original link rather than creating a redirect chain
Run a controlled process
- Crawl the public canonical site.
- Prioritise navigation, conversion and highly linked pages.
- Confirm failures with a direct request.
- Repair the source link and destination behaviour.
- Recheck after deployment and monitor new errors.
Acceptance check
Do not redirect every missing URL to the home page. Each repair should preserve user intent and avoid chains through several historical addresses.
Preserve the reader’s purpose
A broken link to an old price list should not automatically redirect to the home page. Determine whether the information moved, was replaced, became obsolete or should remain unavailable. Update reusable blocks so the same error is not repaired page by page.
Records to keep
- Broken URL, source page and link text.
- Decision: update, remove, redirect or retain temporarily.
- Redirect map and owner.
- Re-crawl evidence.
Owner test: Select ten high-priority failures and confirm that each repaired destination satisfies the promise made by the original anchor text.
Sources and date checked
This practical guidance was checked against the following primary sources. Date checked: 21 July 2026.
Keep the decision under your control
Retain the relevant accounts, source material, supplier terms and recovery information. Recheck changing prices, interfaces and rules before acting.