Understanding Broken Links in WordPress Sites

As a website owner, it is crucial to keep your WordPress site updated with current links and content. Broken links can tremendously harm your site’s search engine ranking and user experience. However, identifying broken links might prove challenging at times. In this guide, we will show you how to remove these distressing dead links on your WordPress site, therefore enhancing the website’s performance.

What are Broken Links?

Broken links or dead links refer to hyperlinks that are no longer functional on a website due to obsolete destination URLs. They create a negative user experience by reporting a 404 error message, which reinforces the site’s low ranking in search engines, causing traffic loss.

No time like the present

Broken links can negatively affect your website in several ways:

• It might cause traffic loss: This situation eventually causes user frustration and, in the end, abandoning of the site or taking their business elsewhere, which leads to a decrement of revenue generation and search engine ranking.
• It can lead to a decrease in Domain Authority (DA): Broken links depict the site as unprofessional and of poor quality, consequently lowering the site’s overall authority.
• A negative user experience spoils your brand reputation: This error message leads to user disappointment and creates the wrong impression of your brand, leading to fewer chances of pulling repeat visits, sagging with loss of potential customers.
• Wastage of resources: Broken links on a website takes up server resources leading to longer page load times and at the same time distraughtly providing a terrible user experience.

Finding Broken Links on Your Site

Identifying the broken links on your site is the first step in removing them altogether. There are different Word Press plugins to help you with this process. Some of the prominent broken link checker plugins include:

1. Broken Link Checker Plugin: A plugin that is easy to use and can scan the entire site with ease, detecting broken links and issues with missing images.
2. WP Link Status Pro: A premium plugin with advanced features such as customizable link testing frequency and intelligent caching, hence minimizing server load.
3. SEMrush: A plugin that provides an SEO audit tool to check on the number of broken links on the site.

Removing Broken Links in WordPress

There are different ways to remove broken links in WordPress. The choice of method depends on the number of broken links on your site.

Manual removal

If your site has only a few broken links, then manually removing them might be the most straightforward option. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard and find the page or post that has a broken link.
2. Hover your mouse over the broken link, right-click, and select “edit.”
3. Edit the broken link by deleting or changing the URL, then save the changes.
4. Ensure that the link works perfectly by testing it.
5. Repeat the above steps until all the broken links are removed.

Use plugins to remove broken links

If your WordPress site has plenty of broken links, you might consider using a plugin. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Install and activate the Broken Link Checker Plugin.
2. Navigate to “Tools” and click on “Broken Links” to access the list of broken links on your site.
3. Select the broken links you want to remove and click “Unlink” to remove them from your site.
4. Repeat this process until all the broken links are removed.

Use the .htaccess file to remove Broken links

Sometimes, you might want to remove a vast number of broken links. In such scenarios, using plugins might not be an option. You might consider using the .htaccess file to redirect the links to a page that works correctly. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Login to your site’s server via FTP or File Manager.
2. Locate the file .htaccess file in the root directory of your WordPress site.
3. Open the .htaccess file using any text editor.
4. Copy and paste this code snippet on the .htaccess file:

   Redirect 301 /old-url.html http://www.yourdomain.com/new-url.html

5. Replace “old-url.html” with the old broken link URL and “new-url.html” with the working URL.
6. Repeat this process until all the broken links on your site are remedied.

Conclusion

Broken links can hinder your business’s online visibility, leading to traffic loss and, ultimately, revenue. However, with the strategies outlined in this guide, you can easily detect and remove all the broken links on the site, hence improving the overall efficiency of your WordPress site. Besides, it is essential to regularly scan your site to ensure everything is in place.