Running a broken links and 404 audit on a website

A broken links and 404 audit is one of the quicker checks you can run on a prospect's site, and one of the easiest to explain to a business owner who has never heard the term. Click a link on their own homepage, get a blank page or an error, and the point makes itself before you say a word. A joiner in Rotherham with a “gallery” link pointing at a page deleted two rebuilds ago does not need convincing that something is wrong. They need someone to tell them it is happening.

Why a dead link costs more than it looks like

A single 404 rarely sinks a business, but it chips away at trust in a way that is hard for the owner to notice from the inside. A visitor who clicks “book now” and lands on an error page does not usually try again on a different page. They leave, and often they do not come back, because the failure reads as neglect rather than a one-off glitch. Search engines read the same pages too, and a site with a pile of dead internal links or images that fail to load is harder for them to crawl properly, which quietly works against everything else the business is doing to be found. Neither of those costs shows up anywhere the owner is likely to look, which is exactly why pointing it out tends to land well.

Where broken links actually come from

Almost nobody sets out to leave a dead link on their own site. They accumulate. A page gets deleted during a redesign and nobody checks what still pointed at it. A supplier or a booking widget the site used to link out to closes down or changes its own address. An old blog post references a promotion that ended two years ago and links to a page that came down with it. Images are the quieter version of the same problem: a photo hosted on an old server or a since-deleted social post leaves a broken icon sitting where a picture used to be, which looks worse than no image at all. None of this is anyone deliberately cutting corners, it is just what happens to a site that gets edited over several years without anyone re-checking what still works.

Free tools that do the checking for you

You do not need to click every link on a site by hand. Google Search Console, free for any site owner who has verified their domain, lists crawl errors and pages it could not reach under its indexing reports, though it only shows what Google itself has found, which can lag behind reality. Screaming Frog's free version will crawl up to 500 URLs on a site and list every broken internal and external link along with the page it was found on, which is normally more than enough for a small local business site. A handful of free online link checkers do a lighter version of the same job if you just need a quick read before deciding whether a fuller audit is worth your time.

Internal links versus external links

Not every broken link deserves the same weight in a pitch. A dead internal link, one page on the site pointing at another page on the same site that no longer exists, is entirely within the business's control to fix and usually points at a genuine gap, like a service page that got removed without anyone updating the menu that linked to it. A broken external link, pointing out to a supplier, a press mention or a directory listing that has since moved or closed, is a smaller issue and sometimes not worth mentioning at all if it sits somewhere a visitor is unlikely to click. Lead with the internal ones. They are the ones actively sending a paying customer to a dead end on the business's own site, which is a sharper example than a stale link to someone else's page.

What to check beyond the crawl report

A crawl tool catches most of what matters, but a couple of things are worth checking by hand as well. Contact forms and booking widgets sometimes fail silently rather than returning a proper error, so a form that looks fine but simply does nothing when submitted will not show up on any link checker's report. That failure mode, and the wider cost of a business website quietly turning enquiries away, is covered in more depth in dead booking links and broken forms. Worth a manual click-through on the main navigation and the primary call to action too, since those are the paths an actual customer is most likely to follow, and the ones where a failure costs the business the most.

Turning the findings into a pitch

A list of dead pages reads better as a short, specific note than a dumped export from a crawl tool. Name the page, describe what a visitor sees when they click it, and where it sits in the site, rather than handing over a spreadsheet of URLs that means nothing to someone who does not work in this. Grouping it alongside the rest of a proper site check, the kind covered in a website audit checklist for agencies, tends to land better than a broken-links report on its own, since it shows the business a fuller picture rather than a single complaint fished out to justify contacting them.

Running a full crawl by hand is manageable for one site at a time, but it does not scale to checking every business in a trade and town before deciding who to contact first. Patchscout audits speed, SEO, mobile behaviour, SSL and the site builder for every business it finds, giving you the wider picture to work from before you go looking for the dead links and error pages yourself. The three free searches at app.patchscout.co.uk/signup are enough to see it against a trade and town you already know.