A visitor scrolling through your website always looks forward to the information that is easily available. Whether it is information on a home page or links to other pages on a website, people will spend as much time as your website allows.
When people find broken links on a website, it can make them think that your business is amateur and unprofessional. It affects user experience and pulls down the website ranking. And for this reason, finding and fixing broken links is necessary to make visitors stay longer on your website.
In this blog, we will guide you through online tools for identifying dead links, find ways to fix them, and at the same time present the benefits of web design in Melbourne to help you through the process. Let’s begin.
What Causes Broken Links?
A broken link is a link to a page that no longer exists. If your homepage contains two or more links that take users to service pages but when it fails to redirect users to these pages almost every time, it is likely due to several reasons.
- Changing the page structure and not updating the old links.
- Pages are removed from the website.
- Renaming the website and forgetting to update the links again.
On the other hand, if your website leads a visitor to other websites, PDFs, or forms but when the errors like “404 Bad Request” or “404 error” pops up, the following are a few reasons. It is useful to have a professional company offering web design in Melbourne to assist your website with link building and testing.
- Changes in the external web content.
- Permanent removal of the external website.
- Changes in the URL structure of the external website without using 301 redirects.
- Not renewing the external website’s domain.
- Typo errors in the URL that takes users to other websites or pages.
- Outdated HTTP protocols.
- External website owner deleting the images or videos.
Finding Broken Links
Now that you understand the many reasons behind the broken links on a website, here are some strategies to find them.
1. Google Search Console:
Google Search Console is an amazing tool that offers site coverage features. Search your web URL in the search bar, pick the coverage report option, and go through the errors section. Under this, you will find pages that show 404 errors, export these pages, and use a URL inspection tool to test them. If you need external assistance, look for expert web design in Melbourne to design a crawlable website.
2. Ahrefs:
This is an active online link checker tool that finds broken external and internal links. On the site explorer, click on external links and broken links to find them. If your website is more extensive, consider using the site audit tool.
3. Chrome Extension: Broken Link Checker:
Google has the most powerful extensions for finding internal and external errors in the link. Installing the free broken link checker tool will save your time and effort. To use this tool, simply login and place your website’s URL on the search bar. Hit enter and you will be able to view the report for any broken links.
Finding broken links through the online tools is a straightforward process. But at the same time, it also shows the failure to update the website. If manually updating the website links is time-consuming, a professional web design in Melbourne can assist you in every step.
Fixing Broken Links
As long as you have time to find the broken links all by yourself, you are good to invest extra time in fixing them. Here are some tips to fix broken links.
- Check the internal links to see if the spellings are correct. Typos in the URLS can be a reason for broken links.
- Use 301 redirects if you are moving pages to different locations on a website or are modifying the content of a specific page. 301 redirects automatically takes users to a new location without any issue.
- Create missing pages or remove broken links if the content is outdated.
- Consider a professional service like web design in Melbourne to test run the website and monitor the web performance.
Final Words
We hope you liked reading this blog. Clearly, websites containing broken links can eventually lose potential customers. As mentioned above, if you are changing the web content, moving the content, or altering the URL structure, it can affect the existing links.
Finding the non-working links to other websites or within the website is crucial to fix them before you start losing more revenue. Fixing them with the help of above tips is a full proof strategy, however, the assistance of a professional web designer in Melbourne can assure that the problems don’t exist in the first place.
If you are finding a professional company offering web design in Melbourne, trust MakeMyWebsite that offers comprehensive designing to monitoring support.
