Skip to content

How To Check Your Blog For Broken Links

  • by

Just started a new blog? Are you trying to grow your blog’s traffic organically? During the process of building your blog, getting your presence known on Social Media, building your email list, and optimizing your content for search engines are all great ideas!

Everyday Smart Affiliate Hub receives traffic from Google, Bing, and other sources. Ranking for the appropriate keywords on your blog will help you attract new visitors. How you convert them into a customer is another story. But at least it’s a start. After all, the chances of making any type of sales without visitors are 0%.

However, there’s something that we all overlook and it’s not uncommon. Broken links will appear on any blog unless you don’t create content at all. Unlike your blogroll (you can see it), a broken link requires digging to find.

Chances are, you don’t even know that you have broken links until a kind reader brings it up. Right now, Smart Affiliate Hub has over 400 blog posts, so it’s probably a lie if I tell you that I don’t have any broken links myself. Then again, I do check my Google Search Console quite often to check for errors.

It’s Not Always You With The Broken Links

Yup, it’s not always you with the broken links. When you internally link to other articles within your blog. You have total control over it. When I internally link, I would search for the appropriate article so if it’s broken I would know before linking to it. As long as I don’t delete my older blog posts, those links are going to stay active for as long as my blog exists.

Now when you link externally (which you should), you have far less control over it. Let’s say I linked to a popular make money online blog today. It can become broken tomorrow if that website goes offline. It’s simple, the article that I linked to, no longer exists.

Why is this important for you?

A broken link delivers poor user experience. Imagine yourself as a reader. If you stumble upon my blog and realizing that every link that you click here leads you to a 404 page that shows nothing.

Use The Broken Link Checker Plugin

broken link checker wordpress
  • Save

WordPress Plugin: Broken Link Checker

Forget about checking for broken links manually. That would take way too long especially if your blog has hundreds or thousands of content. The nice thing about blogging is available automation.

I handle most of my blog with WordPress plugins. Without plugins, I would have to manually do some of the work. Nobody likes extra work and for broken links, I recommend Broken Link Checker. As the name suggests, it does exactly what you want it to do.

It automatically scans and monitors your blog to check for broken links. Also, it’s not just your blog posts, but the entirety of your blog. That’s what makes this plugin so powerful and the reason why there are over 600,000 active installs (subject to change).

If Broken Link Checker detects a broken link, you will receive a notification through the WordPress dashboard or via email. Don’t be surprised when you see this, but instead deal with it accordingly.

How To Deal With Broken Links

Leaving broken links on your website will not do you or your readers any good. So as soon as you get notified of a broken link, you have a few ways to deal with it.

  • You can edit the URL and point it to a valid URL. This requires a little bit of digging because some bloggers do change their title to optimizing clickthrough rate.
  • You can unlink it temporarily and add a different one later. When doing so, the text will stay intact.
  • Go on Google Search Console and mark it as not broken. You should only go this route if you know that it’s temporary. Sometimes a website goes down due to network issues, so we can’t assume that the link will stay broken forever.

I recommend you address the issue immediately so it doesn’t pile up. It’s more efficient and creates a better experience for your readers if you take care of the problem right away.

Don’t Let Your Broken Links Go To Waste

You should always have a backup plan. Sometimes life gets in the way and you just simply don’t have the time to check your blog. That’s why I recommend creating a custom 404 page, so you can leverage it.

With a custom 404 page, you can turn it into a lead generating tool. Here’s a broken URL that I made up to give you a sample of what my custom 404 page looks like. It’s not the best, but it’s definitely better than the default 404 page.

If you have additional questions, comments, or concerns. Please leave a message down below and I will try my best to help you out!

Kind Regards,

home, make money online home, make money online now, make money working from home, niche, niche website, self employed, SEO
  • Save

nv-author-image

Eric Chen

A regular person who envisions his success from helping you become successful. He is not featured in the New York Times, but we all start somewhere, right?Life Motto: Nobody will ever pay you, the way you pay yourself. Be your own boss and control your own income.

Scroll To Top

Sign Up For Wealthy Affiliate And Transform Your Ideas Into Profits!
divi layers

Get Divi by Elegant Themes For Free!!!

Share via
Copy link