Imagine a user lands on your website’s homepage. Great stuff, you’ve got someone coming into your sales funnel. Now this person starts clicking on a few links here and a few links there. Good, that means they’ve got a search intent and are looking for an answer, solution, or product from your site.
However, if any one of these links is broken and fails to connect… boy, are you in trouble. Much of our online experience is a journey of clicking one link to the next. And your broken link just led to a user getting frustrated and abandoning your site. Broken links can affect your domain’s key metrics, such as traffic, bounce rate, duration, and conversion rate. And this does not include the downsides from an SEO perspective. Many search engines require valid links to crawl your website in order to index them. Failing to do so will result in your website losing its reputation and a dramatic drop in rankings.
