Broken Links On A Website Increases Bounce Rates
Are you looking at the best ways to check for broken links on a website? Broken links are bad for business, it is terrible in terms of SEO, and most importantly, it is a bad experience for users.
In this post, we’ll dive in deep to see why broken links are something worth seeking out and correcting. Then, we’ll show you seven different methods that you can use to find and fix broken links in WordPress without slowing down your site.
Seven Ways To Find And Fix Broken Links In A WordPress Website
Broken links affect the user experience negatively. In addition to this, search engines do not like them. So it is a good idea to remove or fix broken links on a website. Here’s seven ways:
1. SEMRush
Run a full website audit in minutes with the SEMRush site audit tool. Check for over 120 common website issues and get special reports about your site’s crawlability, use of markups, internal linking, external linking, broken links, speed/performance, HTTPS, and international SEO.
This site audit tool lists the website’s issues in three different groups depending on their severity:
- Errors (i.e., duplicate content, internal or external broken links, 4xx or 5xx error pages)
- Warnings (i.e., missing meta description, meta words, or H1 headings)
- Notifications (i.e., long URL, external or internal links using rel=”nofollow”)
Check Your Site’s Health in 3 Easy Steps:
- Enter domain name
- Set Crawl Parameters- Choose to crawl the entire root domain, a subdomain, or a set of subfolders.
- Get results- In minutes, you’ll get a full report with your site health score and a prioritized list of errors, warnings, and notices about your site’s health issues
Pair your Site Audit with the On Page SEO Checker to collect tons of actionable recommendations to boost your site’s on page SEO.
2. AHRefs Broken Link Checker
Ahrefs is one of the most popular all-in-one SEO tools for internet marketing. It helps you to analyze backlinks and SEO issues.
AHRefs crawls all the pages on your website, then provides an overall SEO health score. Then, visualizes key data in charts, flags all possible SEO issues, and provides recommendations on how to fix them.
Fix your broken pages. Find the most linked to dead pages on your website.
Find all broken pages with links from elsewhere on your site.
Check for domains that you don’t recall linking to that may have been redirected.
3. Screaming Frog
This popular industry-leading SEO Spider software is trusted by thousands of SEO agencies worldwide for technical SEO audits.
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a website crawler that helps you improve your site’s search rankings, by extracting data & auditing for common SEO issues. You can download & crawl 500 URLs for free at a time, or buy a license to remove the limit & access advanced features.
Find Broken Links
Crawl a website in minutes and find broken links (404s) and server errors. Export the errors and source URLs to make repairs, or send them to a developer.
Audit Redirects
Check for temporary and permanent redirects, identify redirects and loops, or upload a list of URLs to audit in a site migration.
Screaming Frog works with Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu.
4. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another great place to find broken links. Many webmasters’ first choice is Google search console to find the best insights of their website stats and to improve performance.
To use this Google Search Console, you need to verify your site’s ownership and submit an XML sitemap. After verification, Google audits’s your site and gives you a full site audit report.
5. Free Online Broken Link Checker
Totally free tool to check for broken links on a website
This free Link Checker tool not only tells you which links on your site are dead, but it will also show you where exactly those stale hyperlinks are in your HTML code. Highlighting problematic tags. This unique feature makes this website broken link checking service stand out among other available problem detection tools. It makes it easy for webmasters to find bad URLs and clean them up in no time.
6. Sitechecker
Sitechecker is an easy-to-use Website Link Checker. Conduct website audit and find technical SEO errors for the whole domain. Check for broken links and redirects. Make an audit of HTTP status codes: check each URL. Also, you can find 404 errors and check the moves of your traffic when redirected.
Simple steps to use:
- Enter your domain
- Specify rules of site crawling
- Watch how site crawler collects data in real-time
- You’ll get an email alert when the audit is finished
- Detect critical errors and fix them, quick navigation will assist you. All errors are prioritized from the most critical to least critical
7. Dr. Link Check
Easily check for broken links on a website
Dead links are annoying and reflect poorly on your professionalism. They not only increase your site’s bounce rate but also deter visitors from returning to your site. They can also negatively impact your search engine rankings. Even worse than a broken link is a link to a malicious website that causes harm through malware or phishing.
Instead of manually checking all the pages of your site and clicking through all the outgoing links, This dead link checker can do the work for you and give you a report of the links that need your attention.
Conclusion
Having broken links on your WordPress site is bad for user experience, crawlers, and SEO, so you should periodically check for broken links and fix as many of them as possible. Have you tried any of these tools?
