How Do I Find and Fix Broken Links on My Webflow Site?

Why do broken links quietly hurt my website?

Broken links hurt because they waste trust and crawl budget at the same time. A visitor who clicks a dead link often leaves. A search crawler that hits one wastes a visit and learns your site is not well kept. Neither shows up as a loud error, so the damage builds slowly and unseen.

I find broken links on almost every site I audit, even well-run ones. A page gets deleted, a slug changes, an external site moves, and suddenly a link points to nothing. No alarm goes off. The link just fails, over and over, until someone checks.

The good news is that broken links are one of the easiest problems to find and fix. You do not need paid tools or code. This guide shows how I find them, how I fix internal and external ones, and how often to check so they do not pile up again.

What counts as a broken link?

A broken link is any link that leads to a page that no longer loads. Click it and you get a 'page not found' screen instead of real content. Behind the scenes, the server returns a 404 status code, which means the address exists in your link but the page at the end of it does not.

Broken links come in two flavors. An internal broken link points from one of your pages to another page on your own site that is gone. An external broken link points from your site to a page on someone else's site that has moved or been deleted. Both look the same to a visitor: a dead end.

Not every failed link returns a clean 404, either. Some point to a page that now redirects in a long chain, or to a site that is simply down. For this guide, I treat any link that does not reach working content as broken, because to a visitor that distinction does not matter.

Do broken links actually hurt my SEO?

Yes, but indirectly. Google has said broken links are not a direct ranking factor on their own. The harm is real anyway: they frustrate visitors, raise the odds people leave, and waste the crawl visits Google spends on your site. A pile of dead links signals a page no one maintains.

The clearest damage is to visitors. Someone reading your article clicks a link for more detail and lands on nothing. That breaks their trust in the moment and makes your whole site feel neglected. People rarely hunt for the right page; they just bounce.

The crawl cost matters too. When Googlebot follows a broken internal link, it spends a visit learning nothing. On a small site that is minor, but it adds up, and it can slow how fast your good pages get seen. Understanding what a 404 tells a crawler is worth a read, which I cover in my post on HTTP status codes that matter for SEO.

How do I find broken links with Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is the free place to start. Open the Pages report and look at the 'not found' group, which lists URLs Google tried to reach that returned a 404. These are pages Google found through a link somewhere, so the list points you straight at broken targets.

This method has a real advantage: it shows broken links from Google's own crawl of your live site, including ones other sites point at. If you have not set Search Console up yet, it is the first tool I install on any site, and I walk through it in my guide to setting up Google Search Console for a Webflow site.

The limit is that Search Console shows what Google has crawled, not a full live scan on demand. It can lag by days, and it focuses on 404 targets rather than telling you which page holds the bad link. For that, you want a crawler, which is the next step.

How do I find broken links with a crawler?

A crawler walks your whole site like a search bot and reports every link and its status code. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the tool I reach for. Its free version crawls up to 500 URLs with no sign-up, which covers most small sites in one pass and flags every broken link it finds.

Run it by entering your homepage address and letting it crawl. When it finishes, filter the response codes for 404s. For each one, the tool shows the exact page that contains the broken link and the address it points to, so you know precisely what to fix and where. That 'found on' list is the part Search Console does not give you.

Bigger sites, or people who want ongoing checks, can use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, which crawl on a schedule and track broken links over time. For a founder with a small Webflow site, though, a free Screaming Frog crawl every so often is usually all you need.

What is the difference between a broken internal and external link?

The difference is who controls the fix. An internal broken link points to your own pages, so you can fix it directly. An external broken link points to another site you do not control, so your only choice is to update or remove the link on your end. That gap changes how you handle each.

Internal broken links are the higher priority. They are fully your responsibility, they hurt your own navigation, and they are always fixable. Most come from deleting a page or changing a slug without updating the links that pointed to it. These are the ones I clear first on any audit.

External broken links age on their own. A source you linked to two years ago moves or shuts down, and your link rots with no warning. You cannot fix their site, but you can point the link to a working replacement or remove it. Left alone, they slowly make your content feel dated.

How do I fix a broken internal link in Webflow?

In Webflow, you fix an internal broken link by editing the element that holds it and pointing it to the correct page. Open the page with the bad link, select the link, text link, or button, and set its link setting to the right page or the current slug. Then publish so the fix goes live.

Webflow makes internal links easy because you can link straight to a page in the project rather than typing a full address. When you link to a page object, Webflow keeps that link working even if the page's slug changes later. Typed-out URLs do not get that protection, which is why I prefer linking to the page itself.

For links inside CMS rich text, open the collection item, find the link in the content, and update its address the same way. After any fix, reload the live page and click the link to confirm it now lands on real content. A fix is not done until you have seen it work.

How do I handle broken links to pages I deleted?

When the target page is gone for good, a redirect is the right tool. Set up a 301 redirect in Webflow's site settings that sends the old address to the best matching live page. That way, any old link, from your own site or someone else's, still lands somewhere useful instead of a dead end.

This is the fix that also protects your SEO. A 301 passes along the ranking history of the old page and keeps external links working. I set one up whenever I remove or rename a page, and I explain the whole process in my guide to setting up 301 redirects in Webflow.

Do not redirect everything to your homepage, though. A visitor who wanted a specific article and lands on your homepage feels lost. Send each old URL to the closest real match, and only fall back to the homepage when nothing better fits. Relevance is what keeps a redirect helpful instead of annoying.

How often should I check for broken links?

For a small site, a full check every three months is plenty, plus a quick pass after any big change. Anytime you delete pages, change slugs, or migrate a site, check that same day, because those are the moments broken links appear in bulk. Steady, light checking beats one panicked audit a year.

I tie my checks to events, not just the calendar. A redesign, a content cleanup, or a batch of deleted posts all get a crawl right after. Google Search Console runs in the background the rest of the time, quietly collecting 404s I can review whenever I check in.

The point is to keep the list short. Broken links are cheap to fix one at a time and painful to fix a hundred at once. A little attention every quarter keeps your site clean and saves you from a giant cleanup down the road.

Where should I start?

Start with a single Screaming Frog crawl of your site and a look at the 'not found' group in Google Search Console. Between those two, you will have a full list of broken links and the pages that hold them. Fix the internal ones first, then handle external and deleted-page links with updates or 301 redirects.

Do not aim for perfect in one sitting. Clear the internal links this week, set redirects for deleted pages, and put a quarterly check on your calendar. That simple routine keeps a site healthier than most, since the majority of owners never check at all.

If you would rather hand this off, I run broken-link audits and redirect cleanups for founders and small teams as part of keeping a site healthy. I am happy to take a look at yours. Reach out through pravinkumar.co and let's chat about what your links are really doing.