How to Fix: No broken links

No broken links is an important SEO check in the On-Page SEO Essentials category. This is a high-priority SEO issue that should be addressed soon. It has a significant impact on your SEO performance.

What this check is really about

This check hunts for links on your site that lead nowhere — internal links to pages you deleted or renamed, and external links to pages that have since vanished. Every broken link is a small betrayal of trust: a visitor clicks expecting content and hits a dead end, and a crawler following your internal links wastes budget on 404s instead of indexing your real pages. On a site of any age, link rot is not an if; it is a when. Pages get moved, external sites restructure, and the links you set up two years ago quietly stop working.

It is high-priority because the damage is both direct and compounding. Broken internal links leak the link authority that should have flowed to a live page. Broken outbound links signal a neglected, poorly maintained site. And the user-experience hit — bouncing off a 404 — feeds back into the engagement signals that matter. This is unglamorous maintenance, and it is exactly the kind of thing that separates a cared-for site from an abandoned one.

Internal and external breaks need different fixes

Do not treat all broken links the same way. An internal broken link is your fault and fully in your control: the target moved, so either update the link to the new URL or add a redirect from the old one. An external broken link is someone else’s site changing under you, and your options are narrower — update it to the resource’s new home, point it at an archived copy, or remove it if the content is simply gone. The instinct to “just delete every broken link” is wrong for internal ones, where a proper redirect preserves the value you would otherwise throw away.

Redirects are the tool that turns this from a chore into an asset. A clean 301 from an old URL to its replacement keeps both the user and the accumulated link equity intact. That is why I would rather redirect a moved page than hunt down every link that pointed to it — the redirect fixes all of them at once, including the ones on other people’s sites you will never find.

How to Fix This in WordPress

Difficulty Level: EASY – This fix is straightforward and can typically be completed by anyone with basic WordPress knowledge.

Estimated Time: 1 hr

A methodical pass through the whole site:

1. Find every broken link. Use a link checker — Google Search Console’s page-indexing report surfaces internal 404s, and a crawl tool or the Broken Link Checker plugin finds them across posts and pages. Do not rely on spotting them by hand.
2. Fix internal breaks with the right tool. If the target still exists at a new URL, update the link or add a 301 redirect from the old path with a redirection plugin. If the target is genuinely gone, redirect it to the most relevant live page.
3. Repair or remove external breaks. Update the link to the resource’s current location where you can find it, or remove it if the content no longer exists anywhere useful.
4. Set up a soft-404 and redirect policy. Going forward, whenever you delete or rename a page, add the redirect in the same step. That habit stops the backlog from ever rebuilding.

Clear your cache after the pass, and schedule a recurring check — quarterly is sensible — because link rot never stops. This is maintenance, not a one-time fix, and the sites that stay healthy are the ones that treat it that way.

Recommended Tools & Plugins

These tools can help you fix and prevent this issue:

• Yoast SEO – Comprehensive SEO plugin with built-in checks
• Rank Math – Feature-rich SEO plugin with detailed analysis
• Google Search Console – Free tool to monitor your site’s search presence
• SEO Roadmap – Complete SEO audit and action plan tool

The mistakes I see most often

• Deleting internal broken links instead of redirecting them, throwing away the link equity a 301 would have preserved.
• Fixing links once and never scheduling a re-check, so rot silently rebuilds.
• Leaving an always-on Broken Link Checker plugin running on a large site, where it can add real server load — run it periodically instead.
• Redirecting every deleted page to the home page rather than to the closest relevant live page, which frustrates users and dilutes relevance.

Need More Help?

If 404s keep reappearing in Search Console after you fix them, something is still generating links to the dead URLs — often an old menu item, a hard-coded theme link, or an external site you cannot edit but can redirect around. Consult a developer for a stubborn recurring 404, review your redirection plugin’s documentation, and run a complete site audit with SEO Roadmap for a prioritized action plan.

This guide is part of the SEO Roadmap knowledge base – your complete resource for WordPress SEO optimization.