Ever clicked a link on a website and landed on a "404 page not found" error? It's annoying, right? Now imagine that's happening on your own business website, and you have no idea because nobody's told you.

That's the reality for most small business owners. Your customers are clicking broken links on your website right now, but you'll never know because you already know where everything is. You don't click your own links. They do.

What are broken links, exactly?

A broken link is any link on your website that doesn't work. Someone clicks it, and instead of landing on a useful page, they get an error. The page has moved, been deleted, or the URL was typed wrong in the first place.

There are three types you should know about:

Internal broken links are pages on your own site that no longer exist. These are the big ones. If your services page links to a "get a quote" page that's been removed, that's a dead end for your visitor and your highest priority to fix.

External broken links are links on your site pointing to other websites that have gone away. Maybe you linked to a supplier's website or a news article, and that page has since been taken down. These are lower priority, but a page full of dead external links signals that nobody's looking after the site.

Broken backlinks are a sneaky third category. These are links on other websites that point to pages on your site that no longer exist. Another business might have linked to your blog post or a product page, and if you've removed or renamed that page, you're losing the value that link was sending your way. That value, sometimes called link equity or link authority, is essentially a vote of confidence from one site to another in the eyes of search engines.

Why do broken links matter for a small business?

Let's start with the obvious one. When a customer visits your site and clicks a link that leads nowhere, that's a bad experience. It makes your business look disorganised. If someone's deciding between you and a competitor, a broken link on your services page might be the thing that tips the scales.

Then there's the search engine side of things. Google has said that 404 errors are normal and expected. They don't directly punish you for having them. But here's the thing. Broken links leak the SEO value you've already built. Internal links help search engines understand the structure of your site and pass authority between your pages. When those links are broken, that signal disappears. Over time, a site riddled with dead links signals to Google that it isn't being maintained, and that can affect how your pages appear in search results.

The real damage is indirect. It's not one broken link that hurts you. It's the pattern of neglect it represents. Search engines want to send people to websites that work. Customers want to deal with businesses that pay attention to details.

How do broken links happen?

More easily than you'd think. You rename a page. You delete an old blog post. You update your menu structure. You link to a news article that gets taken down six months later. Each of these creates a broken link, and they add up fast, especially on older sites.

How to find broken links on your site

The good news is you don't need to pay anything to get started. There are several free tools that do a solid job.

Google Search Console shows you crawl errors that Google has found on your site. If Google can't reach a page, it'll tell you. It's free and authoritative, and if you don't have it set up yet, you should.

W3C Link Checker (validator.w3.org/checklink) lets you paste in a URL and it scans every link on that page. Free, no account needed.

Check My Links is a Chrome extension. Once installed, you click the icon and it highlights every broken link on whatever page you're looking at. Red for broken, green for working. It's visual and instant.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop application that crawls up to 500 URLs in its free version. It's powerful and shows you exactly which links are broken and where they sit on your site.

Dead Link Checker (deadlinkchecker.com) is an online tool. Paste your URL, hit check, no signup required.

These are all independent tools, nothing to do with us. Any of them will give you a snapshot of what's broken right now. Run one today and you'll probably be surprised by what you find.

We scanned a plumber's site in Melbourne last month. 14 broken links on his website. Three of them were on his services page, the page where customers decide whether to call. He had no idea until we showed him. He fixed them that afternoon.

The catch with one-off scans

These tools are great for a single check. But here's the honest truth. They don't tell you when something breaks tomorrow. A broken link that appears on a Tuesday because someone updated a page or a third-party site went down won't show up until you run the scan again.

That's where ongoing monitoring comes in. The tools above work perfectly well, but they check once. Farview checks every day so you don't have to. It watches your site and tells you when something goes wrong, before your customers notice.

Curious what your site looks like right now? Scan your site free at farview.com.au. It takes 30 seconds, no sign-up required, and you'll see exactly what we find. You can fix it yourself, or let us keep watching.