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Websites accumulate dead ends. A service page is removed, a product renamed, a URL tidied during a redesign — and every link pointing at the old address, from search results, directories, printed material and other websites, now delivers visitors to an error. Nobody reports it. The visitors simply leave, and the business never learns those enquiries existed.
What matters here
- Deleting a page does not delete its links — inbound links keep arriving for years.
- Redirects preserve the value — each retired URL pointing at its closest replacement.
- A useful 404 page recovers visitors — search, navigation and contact details instead of a dead end.
- Internal broken links signal neglect — customers notice, and so do search engines.
The main options
Find them first: free crawling tools and search-console reports list broken internal links and the URLs producing errors — the second list is more valuable, because it shows what real visitors were trying to reach. Fix each by redirecting to the nearest equivalent page, which is configured through the hosting control panel or your platform. This is the same discipline that governs bigger moves: host migrations and any structural change to the site should carry a redirect map rather than a hope. And never retire a URL you have printed on vehicles, signage or packaging — those links live for years and must keep resolving.
A caution on redirect targets
Redirect to the closest genuine equivalent, not to the homepage. Sending everything to the front page frustrates visitors who were looking for something specific and discards most of the value the old page had accumulated. If no equivalent exists, a helpful 404 page explaining what happened is better than a misleading redirect to somewhere irrelevant.
How to choose
Run a link check quarterly, alongside your other routine maintenance, and always immediately after a redesign — which is when most broken links are created in a single afternoon. Then improve the 404 page itself: a clear message, a search box, the main navigation and a contact route turns a dead end into a second chance, which is the cheapest conversion improvement most sites have available.