Imagine how would a visitor react when he finds a lot of broken links on your website or blog. How do you find broken links or track them on a regular basis? Should you check each and every link on your website and test them manually? or should you use a script or plugin to detect broken links on your website?
Typically, every website or blog has a 404 page which is shown whenever a visitor enters a wrong web address in the browser address bar. If your site visitors keep on getting the same 404 page on every other link, there is a high chance they won’t enjoy your website.
The cause of broken links can be many. Some examples are as follows:
1. You had a section on your website which was very popular a couple of years ago. You linked to that section frequently from your blog posts, service and sales pages. Now you have deleted that section and all the previous links that are present in old blog posts now return a 404 error.
2. You have changed your blog’s hosting provider and during the migration from a different content management system to a new one, your previous links are all broken.
3. You changed the permalink structure of your WordPress blog and now all the older permalinks return a 404 page, instead of returningg the actual page that’s on your site.