A broken internal link is a small defect with an obvious symptom: somebody selects a link on your website and does not reach the intended page. On a large or long-running site, these defects can accumulate quietly after pages are renamed, deleted or reorganised. Fixing them improves navigation and gives search crawlers cleaner routes through the site, but the repair should reflect what happened to the missing content rather than sending every broken link to the nearest convenient page.
Find broken links with a site crawl
An SEO crawler is usually the quickest way to identify internal links that lead to error responses. Crawl the website and filter the results for unsuccessful destinations, then examine which pages contain links to each missing URL.
Do not rely solely on the total error count. One missing URL linked from a site-wide template can create hundreds of reported instances. Grouping by destination helps reveal whether you have many distinct problems or one problem repeated across many pages.
Check whether the destination really disappeared
Open the broken URL and investigate what changed. The page may have moved to a new address, been removed intentionally, failed because of a typing error or become inaccessible because of a technical problem.
This diagnosis determines the fix. If the page should still exist, restoring it may be appropriate. If it moved, links should point to the new location. If the original reference is no longer useful, removing the link can be cleaner than inventing a replacement.
Update internal links to the current URL
Where a clear live replacement exists, edit the source pages so they link directly to it. This gives visitors a straightforward route and avoids relying on a redirect for ordinary internal navigation.
Prioritise links in navigation, templates and important landing pages because they can affect many journeys. Then work through contextual links in articles and other content. Check the surrounding sentence while editing: a technically valid replacement may not make sense if the new page serves a different purpose.
Use redirects when old addresses still have value
A redirect can be useful when a page has genuinely moved and people or external websites may continue using the old address. It provides continuity beyond the internal links you control. Even then, updating your own links to the current destination is good maintenance.
Avoid redirecting every deleted page to the homepage. That rarely satisfies somebody who expected specific information. Choose a genuinely relevant successor where one exists; otherwise, allowing the old URL to remain unavailable may communicate the situation more accurately.
Repair broken links caused by templates
If the same broken destination appears across many pages, inspect shared navigation, footer elements, related-content modules or other reusable components. One template correction may remove a large number of errors at once.
This is also a reason to involve a developer when the source is not obvious. Manually editing generated pages can waste time if the content management system simply recreates the faulty link later. Fix the rule that produces the error, not only its visible output.
Look for pages that became orphaned
Broken-link work can expose a second problem. During restructuring, a live page may lose the internal links that previously connected it to the site. It still loads if you know the URL, but ordinary visitors and crawlers have few routes to discover it.
Review whether important pages have sensible contextual and navigational links. Do not add links merely to increase a count. A page should appear where it genuinely helps the visitor continue a task or understand a related subject.
Re-crawl after the repairs
Run the relevant crawl again once changes are complete. Confirm that the original broken destinations are no longer linked and check whether your edits introduced new errors. Test representative links manually, particularly when redirects or template changes were involved.
Keep the before-and-after results if the website is managed by several people. They provide a useful record of what was corrected and can help identify recurring publishing or migration problems.
Prevent broken internal links from accumulating
Make link checking part of routine website maintenance and include it after migrations, large content removals and URL changes. When a page is renamed or retired, consider its incoming internal links as part of the change rather than as a later SEO clean-up task.
Broken internal links are simple to understand but valuable to fix because they reveal whether a website is being maintained as a connected system. Find them systematically, determine what happened to each destination, choose the repair that best serves the visitor and verify the result. That process produces cleaner navigation without resorting to indiscriminate redirects or unnecessary SEO work.