How to Find and Fix Broken Links in WordPress

Broken links accumulate quietly: you rename a page, a site you linked to disappears, an image gets deleted. Individually harmless; collectively they waste crawl budget, lose readers mid-article, and make a site feel unmaintained.

Find them

Three sources, and you want all three because each sees something the others do not:

• Google Search Console → Pages. Look at "Not found (404)". This is authoritative: it is the URLs Google actually tried, and it includes links from other sites pointing at pages you removed.
• A crawler. Screaming Frog's free tier handles 500 URLs; Ahrefs and Semrush do it hosted. A crawl finds broken links within your pages, which Search Console does not report.
• A broken-link plugin. Convenient, but be careful: the older ones scan continuously and are a genuine performance problem on large sites. Prefer one that scans on demand, or run an external crawler instead.

Fix internal links at the source

If a post links to a page you renamed, edit the post and correct the link. Do not rely on a redirect to paper over it — redirects add a hop, and a redirect chain that later breaks leaves you back where you started with less visibility.

Redirects are for URLs other people link to. Your own links should point at the right place directly.

Redirect old URLs you changed

If a URL genuinely changed and external links or rankings point at the old one, add a 301 from old to new. A redirect plugin handles this without touching server config.

Two rules worth following:

• Redirect to the closest equivalent page, not the home page. A blanket redirect of everything to the home page is treated as a soft 404 and helps nobody.
• Avoid chains. A → B → C should be rewritten as A → C. Chains slow crawling and lose a little signal at each hop.

External links: fix, replace, or remove

When a site you linked to has gone:

1. Check the Wayback Machine — if the content still exists archived and it is genuinely useful, link there.
2. Find a current equivalent source and link to that instead.
3. If neither exists, remove the link but keep the sentence. Deleting the whole claim because its citation died usually damages the article.

Broken images

These have their own causes: a migration that did not rewrite URLs, an uploads folder that did not transfer, or a hardcoded http:// URL on an HTTPS site. Fix the URLs in the database with a search-and-replace tool that handles serialised data — a plain SQL replace corrupts serialised option values and will break plugin settings.

Do not let 404s be a dead end

Some 404s are correct — the page is gone and there is no equivalent. Make the 404 page useful: a search box, links to your main sections, and your most popular posts. A visitor who lands on a helpful 404 often stays.

Keep on top of it

• Check Search Console's 404 report monthly. It is the cheapest possible monitoring.
• Crawl the site quarterly.
• When you change a slug, add the redirect in the same sitting — not later.
• Prefer linking to your own stable URLs rather than to pages you know are seasonal.