You’ve probably heard of ‘broken links’ but do you actually know what they are? And do you know what to do about them? And how about your 404 page (what?) have you thought about that too?
Let’s start simply…
What are Website Broken Links?
If you click on a link and it doesn’t go where you expect, then that’s a broken link. It might go nowhere at all, leaving you stranded on a not very helpful error page, or it might take you to a page that seems vaguely relevant perhaps, but you’re not entirely sure and suspect it’s all a bit old or out of date.
The problem is that you have a visitor to your website who follows a link and arrives …nowhere! What impression does your visitor have then?
How do Broken Links Happen?
Broken links happen because current web technology allows us to change our web pages and our blog posts so easily. We can add and remove pages and posts with little effort and there’s nothing to make us stop and think about the implications.
If you decide to remove a blog post (maybe because it’s so out of date) then anything that links to that post will have nowhere to go. That’s a broken link, whether that’s a link from within your own website or a link from another website.
404 Error Page
This leads straight on to: What do you do with your 404 errors? What … don’t even know what they are!
In plain English, it’s what happens when someone tries to go to a page or bog post on your website that doesn’t exist. A 404 error is generated and on most sites a 404 error page is displayed saying something helpful :-/ like:
- ‘404 error’
Slightly better are the sites that say:
- ‘ Sorry something went wrong’ and give the visitor some options
My personal ‘worst of all’ are the sites that say:
- ‘oh, you made a mistake’. Did I? Me, your visitor? Even if I did, do I need to know that?
Best of all, is to make sure no 404 errors happen due to your broken links (the answer to that is regular Website Testing).
If you want to know what your site does, type in the address of your site followed by something that doesn’t exist:
- For example, http://www.dawnb.co.uk/no_page
Now tell me, having read this and looked at your 404 error page, are you going to change it, or are you happy with it?
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