How do you prevent broken links on your website?

When running any kind of website for a long time, it is common to see that links and references break after some time. This is common, but just because it is common, you shouldn't accept that for your own site. Broken links are a terrible user experience, because they interrupt the reading flow of the user. Just imagine yourself researching a topic and trying to get to the bottom of it, and just as you think you got the hang of it, you are faced by an HTTP 404 error, because the URL you clicked led you to a broken page, i.e., the link you clicked was broken.

In this article, we will explore how you can prevent internal and external links from breaking:

To some, it might not seem to be necessary to explicitly check for broken links and pages. But as time goes on, there is always something changing on each and every website. This will eventually lead to links breaking, because URLs are updated or changed without HTTP redirection or changing the source that is linking with the now outdated URL.

The Pew Research Center conducted an analysis in which they found that a quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible. This figure also includes your website! So this is a real factor website administrations need to address, or else they will be affected. Of course, broken internal and external links will eventually lead to bad SEO if not addressed. Google wants your users to see good content, not broken pages.

So now we will try to distill some strategies, tools and methods, that will help you check your content for broken internal and external links and also how to prevent them altogether. Read on to protect your pages.

CMS-style internal links

One way to prevent broken links entirely, at least for internal links in this case, is using CMS-like internal linking mechanisms. In many CMS, you don't actively manage the URLs of the pages you link to; this is done by the CMS. You only address the pages you want to link via their internal ID or some other denominator. This way of preventing broken pages mostly only works for internal links, because external links are not managed in this way by CMS. You can also replicate this strategy in some web frameworks by using constants in code to refer to a page, where the value of the constant is the relative URL of the page you are linking to. You could also use this strategy if you are linking to an external page multiple times. This strategy is pretty effective in preventing broken pages, but it doesn't guarantee all links are handled this way.

There still remains a very real possibility that some links break out of this way of linking pages and use the URL directly for external or internal links. The only real way of knowing for sure will always be to have a monitoring system watching your pages 24/7 and notifying you if a broken link is detected. Alythus offers a free broken link check, where you can check a singular page for broken links. For a comprehensive analysis with actual monitoring capabilities, you are welcome to take a look at our premium product.

There are more strategies to prevent broken links and pages. Let's take a look at them.

Automatic archiving

Another strategy some large sites, like Wikipedia, use, is automatic archiving. This is most useful for content-heavy pages and wikis. The way this strategy works is, that whenever a new piece of content, a new page, is published, it is automatically submitted to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The content there is identified by the URL under which it was submitted. The Internet Archive takes a snapshot of the content of the page at that time, including the links, pictures and other resources.

The second part of this strategy takes place at your page. Whenever a link is broken, i.e., an HTTP 404 page would be returned, the page is redirected to the Internet Archive. The URL that was searched for then is searched in the archive's database, and its content is returned, if found. This is a backup mechanism. It doesn't prevent broken pages entirely, because if the page is not archived, it will still fail. But for large sites, it could make sense to implement this manual strategy, because of the large amount of broken links that add up over time.

Continuous monitoring

The only real safety net, however, is having your pages continuously monitored for broken links and broken pages. Preventing broken links is crucial, but when publishing content, you will eventually make mistakes, as we all do. And at that point you need to know about your links, which of them are broken, and which pages try to link using the broken URL. The only way to accomplish this is by monitoring your page externally. This is why we built broken link monitoring in Alythus. We monitor your website for broken links by searching through your site 24/7. This way, you only have to worry about fixing broken links when they actually occur. We will notify you! This way, your users have the best content, and crawlers like the Googlebot always get served SEO-optimized pages, without broken pages. Try Alythus for broken link monitoring for free by clicking the link.