Once you live your site on the web, there is much maintenance work to accomplish time-to-time for a better user experience. Among those all, Broken Link is one that also affects WordPress SEO ranking.
What are Broken Links?
Generally, Broken Links means the link/URL that resulting in the error page. In another word, it is a dead link, that no longer works. You may face the situation that websites outbound links directing visitors to the non-existing pages. It can arise because of variant reasons.
How it occurs?
You are reaching this far means, you may get some links from your site often display a 404 error. Broken links typically occur when the page it leads to, deleting or moving or the URL has changed. Moreover, it happens when the link is outsourcing from third-party websites and the editor makes some modifications after some time. Sometimes, broken links can occur due to a typo or unexpected change in the permalinks.
It occurs when:
- The permalink structure has modified,
- The page slug renamed i.e. website.com/themes/ to website.com/free-themes/,
- The page is removed,
- URL from the third-party websites has suspended,
Of course, there may be other reasons to cause broken links to your website. But mostly those are as per I mentioned here.
People believe that displaying an error page is a good idea rather than not showing any result but that frustrates users. Likewise, checking every link manually is also time-consuming and annoying.
There are some easy-to-use plugins to check and fix these issues:
- Use Ahref to find broken links:
Ahref is an All-in-one SEO standard tool to improve your website performance. It helps you to do a detailed analysis of your and your competitors’ website. You can simply input the site domain under the site explorer tool of Ahref and get the result.
- Finding broken links using Link Checker
It is one of the popular broken link checkers of WordPress. It uses an external service to crawl and find out broken images & links to your website. This plugin works out of the box as it finds all internal and external links. However, the crawler visits all pages of your website, it has a low computational cost.
- Install 404 solution
404 Solution redirects all page not found errors and creates a log of them. It especially displays the result for the pages that are mostly visited by the users. This plugin is highly configurable that redirects specific 404 URLs to any existing page.
- Use Broken Link Checker Plugin of WordPress
Broken Link Checker monitors all internal and external links of your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, etc. It facilitates you to fix bad links and improves SEO and user experience.
These plugins scrawl in and out of your website and find out all broken links. But the first thing you must do when this problem occurs is changing your permalink settings from default to something else.
If the problem not solved, edit the .htaccess file. Open your root folder and open the .htaccess file and change the file permission. And again make changes to your permalink settings.
