How to Bulk Check and Fix Broken Links on Your Website

A growing website naturally undergoes updates, page deletions, and link migrations. Over time, this leads to broken links—links that lead users and search crawlers to a dead-end 404 Not Found page. Too many broken links lead to frustrated visitors, diluted domain authority, and lost opportunities. Finding and correcting these dead links manually across hundreds of pages is an operational nightmare. In this tutorial, we will show you how to scan your website, export broken link lists, and use bulk checker workflows to fix them efficiently.

The Cost of Broken Links to SEO and User Experience

Why dead links are harmful:

• Indexation Bottlenecks: Crawlers getting stuck on broken paths, limiting access to healthy parts of the site.
• Conversion Loss: Users exiting your conversion funnel when they hit error pages.
• Reputation Damage: Giving the impression of an abandoned or neglected website.

Internal vs. External Broken Links

• Internal Links: Hyperlinks pointing to another page on your own website.
• External Links: Links on your website pointing to content on third-party sites that may have been moved or deleted.

Step-by-Step Guide to Bulk Checking Broken Links

1. Perform a Full Site Scan: Use standard web crawlers or sitemap analyzers to compile all links.
2. Export Your Link Inventory: Download a CSV of all internal and external link destinations.
3. Execute a Bulk Status Validation: Use an online bulk status checker to quickly isolate the 404s and 500s.
4. Locate the Source Pages: Identify which pages on your site contain the broken links.

How to Fix Broken Links Efficiently

• Update the Link: Point the broken link directly to the new, updated URL.
• Remove the Link: If the content no longer exists and has no replacement, remove the hyperlink tag.
• Redirect the Broken URL: If the page has moved permanently, set up a server-side 301 redirect.