Redirects and broken links
Redirects move people and search engines from one URL to another. Broken links send them nowhere useful. Both are easy to leave behind after a redesign, a domain change, a deleted product page or a CMS migration. Fixing them is unglamorous housekeeping that improves trust and crawl clarity.
Check a page with the redirect checker and the broken link checker.
What a healthy redirect looks like
One clear hop is ideal: http:// to https://, or an old path to its new path. Use 301 when the move is permanent, and 302 (or 307) when it is temporary. Chains — A to B to C to D — add delay, complicate debugging, and can confuse crawlers.
Patterns worth hunting:
- Loops (A to B to A) that never settle.
- HTTP to HTTPS and back to HTTP.
- Apex to
wwwto HTTPS to a trailing-slash variant — four hops where one would do. - Redirects that land on soft 404 pages that return “OK” but say “not found”.
- Campaign short links that bounce through several trackers before the real page.
When you change domains, map important old URLs deliberately. A single catch-all to the home page is better than nothing, but dedicated redirects for popular pages preserve context for visitors and bookmarks.
Why broken links hurt
A broken link wastes the visitor’s click. On your own domain, broken items in the header, footer or main navigation are especially costly because they repeat on every page. Outbound broken links to suppliers or documents also look careless.
Our broken link checker looks at links on the page you enter, on the same host, up to a modest limit (the same light-touch approach as the main scan). It is not a full-site crawl and will not discover every dead URL in a ten-year blog archive unless you check those pages too. After big content deletions, export a URL list from your CMS or Search Console and work through the high-traffic ones first.
SEO angle — without ranking promises
Search engines prefer clear, single-step redirects and working internal links. Clean paths make it easier for crawlers to understand which URL is canonical and to consolidate signals. That does not mean a redirect fix alone will move you up in results, and we do not claim that it will. Treat this as reliability work: fewer dead ends, clearer structure, less confusion when someone shares an old link.
For on-page basics such as title, meta description, canonical, robots and sitemap, use the SEO checker. Pair that with this guide when you are cleaning a migration.
How to prioritise fixes
- Navigation, footer and contact paths — anything global.
- Home page and top landing pages from analytics.
- HTTP to HTTPS and hostname normalisation (one canonical host).
- Old marketing URLs still used in ads, email signatures or printed material.
- Deep archive pages as time allows.
Working with hosts and CDNs
Redirect rules may live in your CMS, your host panel, a reverse proxy, or a CDN. Change them in one place when you can, so you do not stack conflicting rules. After a DNS cut-over, clear or bypass caches when verifying, because an edge node can keep serving an old chain for a short time. Document the canonical host (apex or www, HTTPS, trailing slash policy) so future campaigns and developers do not invent a second “official” URL.
When you retire a page, prefer a redirect to the closest equivalent topic over a blunt home-page dump. Visitors who followed a bookmark deserve a near match. If nothing equivalent exists, a clear 404 with search and navigation is better than an endless loop of soft redirects.
Internally, crawl a sample of templates after a theme update: header, footer, blog post, product, and contact. Our checkers are page-scoped on purpose; your release checklist should still include those template types.
Practical next steps
- Run the redirect checker on your home page and key landing URLs.
- Collapse long chains into one hop where you control the DNS and host.
- Run the broken link checker on templates that appear site-wide.
- Replace or remove dead links; add a dedicated redirect when an old URL is widely shared.
- Re-test after deploy; caches can hide a fix for a few minutes.
Browse more topics on the guides hub, or run the free scan for a wider passive pass.