How to find broken links on your website
By Nick Crookston, Axeldyne · Updated November 4, 2026
A broken link is any link that leads to an error page instead of what the visitor wanted. On a small-business site, the costly ones are the buttons people click to buy, book or call: “Book now”, “Get a quote”, “Menu”, “Services”.
Why links break
- A page was renamed or deleted, but menus and buttons still point to the old address.
- A booking, ordering or payment tool changed its link, or the account was closed.
- A typo, or an invisible character pasted into the link (we found exactly this on a real landscaping site: two home-page buttons led to “Not Found”).
- An outside site you link to (a supplier, partner or directory) went offline.
Free ways to find them
- Click your own key paths. Once a month, on your phone, tap every button on the home page and in the menu. It takes five minutes and catches the links that matter most.
- Google Search Console. Free from Google once you verify your site. The Pages report lists addresses Google tried to load that returned “Not found (404)”.
- A link-checking tool. Free crawlers (such as the W3C Link Checker or the free tier of desktop SEO crawlers) visit each page and report links that return errors.
- Automated monitoring. A monitor re-checks your important pages on a schedule so you hear about a break the day it happens, not months later.
What error codes mean
- 404 Not Found: the page doesn’t exist. Almost always a real problem.
- 410 Gone: deliberately removed.
- 500-series: the server failed. Could be temporary; recheck.
- 403 Forbidden: sometimes real, but often a site blocking automated checkers. Click it yourself before worrying.
How to fix them
- If the page moved, update the link and add a 301 redirect from the old address to the new one, so old bookmarks and Google results still work.
- If the page is gone for good, remove or replace the link.
- For a third-party booking or ordering link, log into that tool and copy the current link again.
Check your site in 10 seconds
Our free checker tests HTTPS, load speed, tap-to-call, contact options and leftover template text. Found something? The Axeldyne team can fix it from $99, with a written quote before any work starts and every fix reviewed by Nick Crookston before it goes live.