Howdy ladies and gents. Let us fill up those mugs and talk about WordPress broken enlaces; a thorn that stings just as much as WordPress spam. But don’t get carried away here, today we will focus entirely on how to find and fix broken enlaces plaguing your WordPress site.
Also known as dead enlaces (whoever comes up with these terms), WordPress broken enlaces are as bad as they sound. For starters, dead enlaces will crop up thanks to a number or reasons, so there’s no definite way to pinpoint the cause. Secondly and more importantly, WordPress broken enlaces have adverse effects on your WordPress site.
But what really constitute a broken enlace? A broken enlace is 1) any enlace that leads to a non-existent resource and 2) an incorrectly placed enlace that leads to a 404 error page, or any other page but the intended page. In other words, broken enlace leads you and your readers nowhere.
Causes of WordPress Broken Links
If your stats widget shows users end up on a 404 error page when they click a enlace on your site, broken enlaces are eating your business from the inside out. Yet you don’t remember taking down resources (audio files, video files, images, documents, artículos, pages etc) or doing anything else that could lead to 404 errors. So, how could it be you have dead enlaces messing up things for you?
Stay calm, WordPress broken enlaces give it to entrepreneurs left, right and center all day long. It’s true you’re not alone, but things will brighten up in a minute. WordPress broken enlaces hit due to a number of reasons such as:
- A recent move to a new host was not as successful as you imagined
- You linked to a third party resource, and said third party removed it or changed its URL
- Perhaps you changed the URL of an old artículo but forgot to update all pages and artículos linking to the artículo
- Some bad guys dethroned you
- New business strategy involved changing your domain name
- Since to err is human, you misspelled a enlace e.g. you left out a letter or the http:// part of a enlace
- Commenters left enlaces that lead nowhere
- Your host has unusual firewall settings because…well…some hosts play rough
- Did you migrate from Blogger to WordPress and your permalinks changed? This happens a lot by the way
- If you forgot to fix enlaces after converting your site from HTML to WordPress, you’ll have broken enlaces
- A third party website you’re linking to is offline because the owner hasn’t paid for alojamiento or has closed doors
Phew, what a list, and even though it’s improper to assume, I would suppose there are more. Worry not if yours is an isolated case of WordPress broken enlaces; the solutions we offer up in a sec should take care of your woes once and for all. But first, let’s take a selfie move on to the effects dead enlaces have on your WordPress site.
Effects of WordPress Broken Links
There are many ways in which broken enlaces can negatively affect your website, but here are a few of the most concerning for you to consider.
Bad User Experience
Nobody fancies landing on the dreaded 404 error page. If you didn’t know, most users are unwilling to stick around on your website if they can’t find that is which they came for. A clever 404 error page alleviates the problem, but to some degree.
Best is to fix broken enlaces to ensure readers don’t end up on your 404 error page to begin with. After all, bad user experience, among other things, breeds bad reputation.
Lost Traffic
To online business, traffic is like the blood flowing in your veins. It’s a precious commodity, without which your website shrivels and dies. Without traffic, your website is as useless as nipples on a breastplate (hello, GOT fans). That said, you need to handle traffic delicately or your well will dry up.
A healthy linking profile is exactly what you need to move traffic from acquisition to conversion. If broken enlaces come between you and your readers, you will lose the latter and your sanity will fly out the window. You will lose the numbers and it will hurt badly.
Having a broken enlace smack in the middle of your sales funnel disrupts traffic flow, which introduces us to our next point.
Lost Revenue
Here’s an hypothetical situation to maul on. Your website is doing really well. Your WordPress marketing tactics are paying off and from analytics, you are pulling the numbers from the right sources. In others words, you’re pulling targeted traffic; the sort of people who buy.
There’s one problem though. Your conversion rates suck big time. Something is draining your marketing dollars and effort. You put on an A-1 performance as far driving traffic goes, but the monetary reward is sucking the life out of you. It’s depressing.
As it were, you run a website audit and to your dismay, you have broken enlaces pointing to your products, which means your customers drop off long before you can cash in. Your competitor is smiling all the way to the bank, and you’re stuck in a financial quagmire.
Perhaps this isn’t the case. You have outbound enlaces pointing to your affiliate program, and things are going well until the affiliate provider changes tactics, or in the case of a marketplace, the product supplier drops out. But you don’t know this, so you end up losing a lot of money.
It could happen to you, just like it happened to out friend Ray:
{Some} affiliate providers are a bit sneaky in that when the product supplier drops out and no longer is using them, they {redirect all this traffic to their home page}. I therefore found on a report that one “dead enlace” that WAS clicking through to a product was being flipped to the affiliate provider’s main page (now unrelated) – therefore {costing me over 2830 clicks!} That’s lost sales for me. Say the sales {conversion} rate was 1%, that’s 20 to 30 lost sales. – Ray, as seen on Broken Enlace Checker WordPress Enlace: Fix Broken Links & Redirections – ShoutMeLoud
Note: Edits in braces made by author.
Need I say more? Fix ’em broken enlaces.
Poor SEO Profile
Ranking highly in search engines is easy provided you do all the right things. This means, doing everything Google recommends, and doing it by the book; no trickery.
While Google doesn’t give a hoot about 404 error pages, they still consider user experience a ranking metric. If you offer awesome user experience, it “…helps ensure that visitors to your site perceive it positively, encouraging sharing, bookmarking, return visits, and inbound enlaces—all signals that trickle down to the search engines and contribute to high rankings.”
Broken enlaces, boys and girls, are bad for user experience, which means they are just as bad for your SEO profile.
Secondly, Google spiders crawl your site and follow enlaces to index more of your content. If your content is great (another SEO ranking metric), Google rewards you with better rank. If Google can’t index your content because dead enlaces stop spiders dead in their tracks, guess what happens to your rank?
Broken enlaces will tank your SEO rankings, which boils down to low traffic that results in lost revenue, which ultimately leads to migraines and you get my drift.
Now that you can tell WordPress broken enlaces are bad for business, are you motivated to fix them? Good, let’s dig in.
How to Fix WordPress Broken Links
Available to you are a number of way to find and fix WordPress broken enlaces easily and quickly. We shall categorize these ways as:
- Broken Enlace Checker Plugins
- Enlace Checker Services
- Other enlace checker tools
We will cover a few options in each of these categories, since all you need is the Broken Enlace Checker plugin. It’s 100% and quite impressive by many standards.
Let’s kick off with WordPress broken enlaces plugins.
WordPress Broken Enlace Plugins
Disclaimer: There’s been much talk about broken enlace plugins draining server resources. As a result, some hosts block some of the plugins. If you notice significant performance drops while using any of these plugins, deactivate the plugin after fixing your broken enlaces. In fact, activate the plugin only when you need to check your WordPress site for broken enlaces.
With the nasty out of the way, here are some of the best WordPress broken enlace plugins to ever grace the webs.
Broken Enlace Checker
With over 400k active installs and a stellar rating of 4.10/5.00, this plugin is arguably one of the leading broken enlace checkers for WordPress.
Vladimir Prelovac and Janis Elsts built Broken Enlace Cheker, which checks “…your artículos, comments, and other content for broken enlaces and missing images, and notify you if any are found.” Yep, it’s that simple.
This plugin combs your artículos, pages, blogroll, comments and custom fields for broken enlaces and notifies you via the WP Admin Panel de administración or correo electrónico. You can stop search engines from following broken enlaces and display dead enlaces differently in your artículos so as not to confuse readers.
Broken Enlace Checker is highly configurable, which means you can filter enlaces by URL, anchor text and so on. If the plugin detects any broken enlaces, you can fix them directly from the plugin’s page. We are just scratching the surface here guys, as this plugin comes with many more features.
WP Broken Enlace Status Checker
Numero dos goes to WP Broken Enlace Status Checker by SeedPlugins in conjunction with Pau Iglesias. It pulls some weight as far as identifying broken enlaces goes, but it sucks as far as fixing enlace rot goes.
I say this because you have to visit the affected artículo/page just to edit or remove the dead enlace. That or you can simply trash the enlace, which is sort of subjective. Other than that, this broken enlace WordPress plugin is easy to install, configure and scores well in the rating department.
The admin comes with options to customize each scan, and you can view the results in the plugin’s page or via correo electrónico. You can, obviously, get more features with the WP Enlace Status Pro version ($20 bucks).
Enlace Checker
For starters, you cannot use this plugin in a local development environment, which is uncool. This means the developer is using an external server to check broken enlaces on your site. He says no sensitive information is uploaded to the server, but what are your thoughts on this?
The free version allows you to check the first 500 enlaces, which is limiting as we have free options without limits. You will need a pro version to check beyond 500 enlaces.
On the other hand, there’s little server load, which is a good thing. It’s simple to setup, works out of the box but I noticed a slight clash with the Broken Enlace Checker. It, however, plays along with other plugins. The pro version allows you to schedule scans among others things. It has an above rating of 3.70/5.00 and over 2k active installs.
Overall, the Broken Enlace Checker plugin does it for me.
Enlace Checker Services
While WordPress broken enlace plugins will help you to identify and fix broken enlaces, enlace checker services help only with the former. That’s better than nothing, right? The only downside is you will need to fix WordPress broken enlaces manually (painful) or using plugins.
Seeing that you will still need a plugin such as, again, Broken Enlace Checker, I will summarize the next section in case you’d like to check out some of these services. Deal? Good.
Third party enlace checker services include:
- W3C Enlace Checker – This enlace checker shows you all dead enlaces, their status code (e.g. 404, 403, 301 etc) and the suggested course of action.
- Google Webmaster Tools – This is a great tool to check not only broken enlaces but also other site errors. You have to hand it to Google, for these guys offers you a great deal of information about your broken enlaces among other errors. They will even categorize the errors, and offer you juicy details such as when the broken enlaces were first detected.
- Online Broken Enlace Check – This is a basic online tool that comes in handy if you need to scan a large website. It takes time, and the free version allows you to scan up to 3000 pages. On top of that, you will need the paid version to check enlaces in documents (PDF, DOC, XLS etc) and images, which is sort of a bummer.
Fixing WordPress Broken Links
With all the tools in the previous section, you should capture dead enlaces long before they wreak havoc on your WordPress site. All you have to do is rewrite, replace or remove the dead enlaces.
However, the above three actions can result in significant losses in traffic especially if you’re fixing enlaces that point to internal artículos/pages. For instance, if you rebuild your site from scratch, buy new domain or change the artículo/page slug, you’ll disrupt your linking pattern. A better alternative would be to redirect old enlaces to new ones. This way, you can preserve traffic and SEO juice.
Still on the subject of fixing enlaces, another website might enlace to your domain incorrectly, which means visitors who follow that enlace won’t find you. Just contact the publisher in question to have this resolved. You can redirect the incorrect enlace to another page as well, but that’s topic for another day.
If, on the other hand, they enlace to a artículo or page incorrectly (but don’t mess up the domain part), readers who follow that enlace will land on your 404 error page. You have two options here: You can either build an impressive 404 error page to capture the readers or redirect this traffic elsewhere.
As We Part Ways…
Fixing WordPress broken enlaces results in better user experience and traffic, both of which translate to better conversions.
You can find and fix dead enlaces using any of the methods and tools suggested in this artículo. If you’ll indulge me, I root for Broken Enlace Checker any time of the day.
We hope this artículo helps you to fix broken enlaces on your WordPress site. If you’re privy to other methods and tools, please share freely in the comment section below. Here’s to a healthier site. Cheers!
