How to Find and Fix Broken Links in WordPress [UPDATED]

Key Takeaways

in this video i'll walk you through how to find and fix broken links on your wordpress website everybody knows that broken links aren't good for a website but did you know that it could actually negatively affect your search engine rankings on your website that's why having broken links and fixing them is crucial for the growth of your website hey there i'm christina with wpbeginner where we teach all about wordpress so you can grow your website and reach your audience if you find value in this video give it a like it really does help out and all the links i talk about you can find them in the description below so let's dive in the first method i want to show you is by using semrush now simrush is an seo tool it's one of the best ones on the market it will help you do things like find keywords that you can rank for in your website you can also do things like find broken links by doing a site audit using semrush's site audit feature where it'll go out it'll check your site for several different things that you might need to look for and fix and then you can fix them and then it will give you an update it also will show you broken links as i said so you'll want to set up an account with cenrush once you set up an account with summers then the next thing you want to do is over on the left under on page in tech seo you want to go to site audit from site audit you can simply add new project and from here you can add the domain name of your website and do a project name for it as well and then you can say create project and once it'll do that it'll go out and audit your site crawl all of your links on your site and then it'll come back and give you a score this is what it comes up for you and you see you have your overall health you have some errors that you can look at you can dig into that to help with the technical seo of your site one of the cool things you see is down here we've got broken links so i have one here if i click on that it'll take me to where the broken link is and where the issue is so i can go and fix it you can also see that it gives me the status code of 404 meaning there's a broken link so then i can quickly go out fix this update it and then you can set this up on a recurring schedule or you can just rerun the campaign once you make any changes and it'll update your site audit and tell you how well it is doing the cool thing about this also is if you have everyone that you need to go through or if you have a va that you want to send this to you can come up here and export them and so then you'll have them to work off of when it's time to update the broken link method number two is by using another great tool that we use all the time is ahrefs ahrefs is similar to semrush they both show keyword difficulty on how to rank for something they also do keyword research for you as well as some site audit information that you can see how your site is doing same thing with simrush you'll need to create an ahrefs account they also start with a trial for seven dollars for seven days if you want to get started with that once you log in you want to head over to site explorer and you can put in the website url and let's go ahead and click little search icon and from here it'll tell you everything that's going on with the website it does a great job of showing you kind of an overall view of how the site is doing like your backlinks how many backlinks you're getting you can click on organic search to see that if you're doing page search you can see that as well what we want to look for is over on the left we want to scroll down and say best buy links under pages and from here on the http code we're looking for 404 not found from here you can do the same thing you can export them out so that you can work off of that list for later method three is actually using a plugin on your actual site so let's head back over to our website and the next thing that we're going to use is monster insights now monster insights is a great plugin that easily connects your google analytics account with your wordpress website and that way you can see all of the data that's happening on your site right from your dashboard so this is monster insight and when i come here i can see an overview report of exactly how my website is doing with this we can also take a look at the broken link now if you don't already have google analytics connected then you can watch this video as i walk you through how to easily connect your website with google analytics using monster insight and it is a premium plugin because there are a lot of things that you can do with it but for this we're actually showing you what you can do with the free version if you want to get started once it's been tracking and working with google analytics for a little while you can see the broken links by going to your analytics account so go to analytics and you want to go to your website's analytics from here we want to go to behavior and you want to go to site content and let's go to content drill down and from here you can see when we have 404 then those show up if you don't see it on your list you can also do a search for 404 pages and this will be the drill down of what the 404 was and this will tell you the page that was broken a final method that you can use to check and see what broken links you have on your site is by using google search console google search console is also by google they tell you how your website is doing in terms of impressions how many times your website is being seen in google search results when people are searching for things that your site is about so you want to set up google search console for with your website and you can check out this video where i'll walk you through how to do that as well you can simply search for google search console go ahead and start now once you click on that you want to go over to coverage and we'll either find it under the error tab or the excluded tab so if i'm on air i can come down here and that's not it if i go to excluded scroll down if i don't see any not found or a software for so when i click on that found and now i have a list of all of the broken links that i need to go and fix with the others i can click export so i can fix those as well and then the final method is by using another plugin called the broken link checker so to do that we need to head over to our wordpress dashboard we need to go over to plugins add new because we need to install the plugin from here i'm looking for broken link checker now do note that this has been a popular method for several years but it's not our recommended method simply because it's very resource intense on your website server so you want to use this as a last resort and also just know that some website company hosting companies like wp engine actually don't even let you install this plugin on your website but if you need to you can click install now and then go ahead and make sure you stick around to activate the plugin as well great once it's activated it'll go through and start processing your site and you can find it under settings link checker as you see as soon as i get over to the general it says it's already found one it's already processed i'm working through 155 urls as it's going down as we're talking so what you can do is we can actually click on this to see what's the broken link and then from here you can actually do a couple of things you can click on it to verify and it is broken you can come back here if you check on it and it's not you can dismiss it or you can recheck once you fix it once it goes through and shows you all the broken links that you have on your website you can go through all of these fix all of these and then it is recommended that you go ahead and remove that and then if you need to do it again you can do it again in the future okay now that you've found all of these broken links what's the best way to fix them if you have a link that you no longer need or that it's broken and you need to do something else with it the best thing to do with a broken link is to redirect that broken link to a page that is still living and breathing on your website and to do that you'll want to set up a 301 redirect this is just seo terms it says hey this used to be a link and now it's forwarding to a new link it's very similar in the us when you update your postal service you used to live one place now you let them know that you're living at a different place and then they're able to forward on all your mail this is the same thing with websites they're forwarding on all of your links to now where that link should live one of the best ways to do this is by using all-in-one seo all-in-one seo is a great seo plugin to have on your website and for this version you'll want to use the pro version because they have a 301 redirect as part of their pro version you can get this by going to all-in-one seo and make sure you use promo code wpb vip and you'll get the best discount on all-in-one seo and i'll walk you through the whole process of downloading and setting it up for your website if you want to watch this video next but once you do the whole setup then you can come over to all-in-one seo on your dashboard go to all-in-one seo and then let's go to redirect and let's go ahead and activate the redirects add-on next we want to go to our settings tab from here you can make sure that 404 logs are active and you'll want to set either an hour a day or a week a week is a good amount of time and that will keep track of 404s that happen once you do all that we can save changes once we set that up we're not going to see anything yet but once it does to start collecting four or four errors in the log you'll see a tab up here that then you'll be able to click on and you'll see some information about those four or four errors once you start doing that you can also set up the redirects here i can just add in the broken link and then the target will be the new link that i want them to go to and then add the redirect now if you're looking for the best way to set up all-in-one seo i'll walk you through step by step on how to set it up here in this video and i'll see you over there