How to Find and Fix Broken Links
Finding and fixing broken links on your WordPress site is essential to maintaining a positive user experience and ensuring your site ranks well in search results. Broken links can lead to frustrating user experiences and negatively impact your site’s SEO. Here is a step-by-step guide on finding and fixing broken links using a checker plugin on your wordpress site.
Make sure all links verify that your content is working properly. To do this, you need an easy way to find and recover broken links in WordPress. Because after your website has been up for a while, there is some maintenance work you will need to start doing. One of those tasks is this.
A broken link is available on a web page that no longer works for one reason or another. The owner may have removed the web page that was directly linked to it, and it is no longer available.
Installing Link Checker WordPress Plugin
- Use a Broken Link Checker Plugin: WordPress offers different plugins to help you find broken links on your website. One of the most popular options is the “Broken Link Checker” plugin.
- First, install and activate the plugin through your WordPress dashboard.
- Configure Plugin Settings: After activation, go to the plugin settings to configure how often you want it to check for broken links. You can set it to run automatically and receive email notifications for broken links.
- Run the Broken Link Checker: Once you’ve configured the settings, run the link checker by clicking on “Tools” in your WordPress admin menu and selecting “Broken Links.”
- Review Broken Links: The plugin will check your website for broken links. You are displaying a list of them on your dashboard.
- Review the list to identify which links are broken and need fixing.
Fixing Broken Links
We show you how to find broken links in WordPress. Now, let’s talk about how to fix broken links efficiently.
You can fix a broken link by redirecting it to another page. One tip for the easiest way to fix broken links and set up redirects is to use the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin. It offers a powerful redirect manager that helps you track 404 error pages by creating 301 redirects.
How to Properly Fix Broken Links in WordPress
First, you must install and activate the AIOSEO Pro plugin. After activation, you must visit the All in One SEO » Redirects page and click the ‘Enable Redirects’ button.
Next, you must go to the “Settings” tab in the Redirects section and enable 404 logging. You may be finding this option in the “Logs” section.
- AIOSEO will also allow you to set the period to record your 404 logs using the drop-down menu. We suggest you select no more than one month for optimal and smooth performance.
- After that, you must ‘Save changes.’ A ‘404 Logs’ tab will now appear in the redirects section in AIOSEO. Click on the account.
- When you enable the 404 logs option for the first time, there will be no data on this page. After allowing the settings, the plugin will only start monitoring and recording 404 pages.
- However, AIOSEO will show a list of broken links on your WordPress website in the ‘URL’ column once active. It will also show how many people visited the link in the ‘Hits’ column and when they were last accessed.
- Now click the ‘Add Redirect’ button for any broken links you want to fix. You will see redirect options to your 404 error URL when you click the button.
- Enter the destination URL you want to redirect your visitors to and select ‘301 Moved Permanently’ as the redirect type from the drop-down menu. Once you have done this, click the ‘Add redirect’ button.
Test it now by visiting the old broken link on your site and being redirected to the new page. Now that you’ve learned do this process for all broken links on your site.
Conclusion
After making the necessary changes, run the broken link checker again to verify that all issues have been resolved. To prevent future broken links, make it a practice to periodically check your website for broken links, especially after updating or reorganizing your content.
In conclusion, regularly checking for and fixing broken links on your WordPress site will ensure a smoother user experience and maintain good SEO practices. So, we hope this guide on finding and fixing broken links using a checker plugin on your wordpress site has helped you!
