A 404 error means a visitor (or a search engine crawler) asked for a page that doesn't exist. Every website accumulates them over time — pages get deleted, URLs get renamed, external links rot away, and the occasional typo slips into a blog post. The question isn't whether you have broken links. It's how you handle them.
This guide walks through the four options you have for fixing a 404, when each one is the right choice, and how to decide which broken links to tackle first when you've got a list of them.
Step 1: Find Every Broken Link
Before you can fix anything, you need a complete list. Don't rely on visitor reports — most people who hit a dead link just leave without telling you. Instead, scan your site with a tool that checks every link on every page.
Broken Link Finder will crawl a page, follow every link it finds, and report which ones return 404s, redirects, timeouts, or other errors. Run it against your most important pages first: your homepage, your top-performing content, your pricing or product pages, and anywhere you know has been getting good inbound links.
For each broken link you find, note down two things: the source URL (the page with the broken link) and the target URL (the dead destination). You'll need both when you decide how to fix it.
Step 2: Prioritise Which Ones to Fix First
On a site of any size, you might find dozens or even hundreds of 404s. Fixing all of them at once isn't always practical, so prioritise ruthlessly. Here's the order we recommend:
- Broken links on high-traffic pages. A dead link on your homepage or a popular article affects far more visitors than one buried on a tag archive page.
- Broken links pointing to your own content. If an internal link is broken, you almost certainly have the power to fix it. External broken links are often out of your control.
- Broken links that Google knows about. Check Google Search Console's "Not found (404)" report. Any URL in that list is costing you crawl budget.
- Broken links with inbound backlinks. If another site has linked to a 404 on your site, you're wasting link equity. These are high-value fixes.
- Everything else. Fix in whatever order makes sense, and don't beat yourself up about the long tail.
Step 3: Pick One of the Four Fix Options
For each broken link, you've got four choices. Work through them in order — the earlier options preserve more SEO value.
Option 1: Update the Link (Best)
If you still have the destination content, just point the link at the correct URL. This is the cleanest fix — no redirects, no lost link equity, no server-side rules to maintain. It's also the only option that works cleanly for external links (where you can't control the destination server).
Example: a blog post links to /services/seo-audit, but you renamed that page to /services/technical-seo-audit. Edit the blog post and update the link. Done.
Option 2: Set Up a 301 Redirect
If the content has genuinely moved to a new URL and you can't (or don't want to) hunt down every link that points at the old location, set up a permanent (301) redirect from the old URL to the new one. Search engines treat 301s as "this page has moved, please update your index," and they pass most of the link equity through to the new URL.
Avoid chaining redirects. If A → B and B → C, update A to point directly at C. Each hop in a redirect chain loses a small amount of link equity and adds latency for your visitors.
Option 3: Create a Replacement Page
Sometimes the old content is gone but there's something similar you could offer instead. If a 404 is getting significant traffic or has valuable backlinks, it can be worth writing a new page to fill the gap — then redirecting the old URL to the new content. This is particularly useful for product pages that have been retired but still attract search traffic.
Option 4: Let It 404 (Sometimes Correct)
Not every 404 needs fixing. If a URL never had inbound links, never appeared in search results, and was only reachable through a broken internal link that you've already removed, it's perfectly fine to leave it as a 404. Google is smart enough to drop dead URLs from its index eventually, and a 404 is an honest answer — "this doesn't exist" — which is better than redirecting visitors somewhere they didn't ask for.
The one thing you should do for legitimate 404s is serve a helpful error page. Include a search box, links to your most popular content, and a clear apology. A well-designed 404 page turns a dead end into a starting point.
Step 4: Prevent Future 404s
Fixing the broken links you have today is only half the job. The other half is stopping new ones from appearing:
- Redirect when you rename. Every time you change a URL, set up a 301 from the old one. Make this a habit before you click publish.
- Check links in old content when you update it. When you refresh a blog post from last year, run the old version through Broken Link Finder first. External links are the usual culprits.
- Schedule regular scans. Monthly for small sites, weekly for large ones. A proper maintenance routine catches link rot before it becomes a problem.
- Use stable URL structures. URLs should reflect content, not implementation. A URL tied to a product SKU is more stable than one tied to a CMS category ID.
Related Tools
Fixing 404s is one part of technical SEO hygiene. For a complete picture of your site's technical health, pair Broken Link Finder with Meta Tag Checker for on-page SEO, Site Speed Check for performance, and SSL Checker for certificate monitoring. All four are free, and together they cover most of the technical issues that quietly hurt search rankings.