If you are a business with a website, you most probably are aware that broken links are terrible for quality assurance. Broken links can destroy your conversion rates.
It's not uncommon for broken links to occur. When you have broken links, whether it’s new FAQ pages, discontinued items, or external links, it can be a real pain. However, fixing them is critical to the continued success and health of your store.
Imagine you’re running a search on Google for MBA courses. You were promised there would be a web page with the courses you were looking for in the search results. The page you’re looking for isn’t available when the link is broken; instead, you receive a 404 not found error page. Now, what are the chances of you returning to that link again?
What Are the Main Causes of Broken Links?
The most common causes of broken links are:
- Trying to create the link without realizing you had made a typo
- The deletion of an image, video, file or an entire web page
- When a page is renamed or moved, you forget to update internal links.
- Using past contents, like images, videos, or PDFs, that were deleted or moved
- The change of domains and the relocation of the site's URL.
A broken link is a frustrating error that needs to be fixed right away for whatever reason.
Below are some of the reasons why you should be fixing broken links on your website:
- User experience - Broken links are an example of a bad user experience. Whether you have an issue of broken external links or broken internal links, they should be fixed.
Many web admins make the mistake of thinking that broken external links don’t matter because it won’t hurt their bounce rate or time on site metrics. However, broken external links are still disastrous for your website.
- Impacts revenue and brand name - Customers come to your site because you have invested a lot in branding and marketing. When they find a broken link on your website, all your branding and marketing will go in vain.
As per a survey, 88% of online customers are less likely to return to a website if they had a bad experience on the site.
- Boosts your SEO efforts - As per Google, one or two broken links do not affect the site's ranking. However, there are indirect impacts of broken links on the ranking. Broken links increase the bounce rate, decrease the session duration of your site that is reflected in search ranking - the rank goes down.
How to find and fix broken links?
You can scan your website for broken links. You can use Google Search Console (GSC) to scan and find a list of pages having 404 errors. If you are not familiar with GSC, you can reach out to your developer or website maintenance team. They will help you with the website scan.
However, there are certain cases where the exact reason for the broken link is not known. In such cases, you should get in touch with the website developer.
Conclusion
To sum up, a few broken links on your website can put water on all the efforts you have made to establish and grow your business. It damages your reputation and can cause revenue loss. Get your website scanned today and fix any issues found at the earliest. It is imperative to make a regular practice of finding the broken links and fixing them.
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