Most business owners would say yes. They'd be wrong.
Studies consistently show that between 20–30% of links on average websites are broken. For older sites with large archives, it's often higher. And most business owners find out when a customer complains — which is the worst possible time to learn about a problem.
If that sounds harsh, consider what's actually happening when someone lands on a broken link: they see a 404 error page, assume your site is unmaintained or dead, and leave. In e-commerce, a broken link on a product page is a lost sale. In services, it's a prospect questioning your competence. In publishing, it's traffic and SEO authority walking out the door.
So the real question isn't "Do all the links on my website work?" It's "How do I know for sure?"
The problem: you probably don't know
Unless you're manually checking links (which, let's be honest, nobody does), your website is slowly accumulating broken links right now. Here's why:
Content rots over time. You link to an external resource that disappears. A partner's website restructures and the URL changes. A product page gets removed. None of these are in your control, but they all break your links.
Internal links break when pages move. You redesign your site, and old URLs change. You meant to update every internal link — and you probably got most of them — but there's always one you missed. On a site with hundreds of pages, those missed links add up quickly.
You don't have time to check. Even if you wanted to manually inspect every link on your website, you're busy running a business. And by the time you'd finished checking, new broken links would already have appeared.
Why this matters more than you think
Broken links hurt in three specific ways:
- Customer experience. A visitor who hits a 404 has a moment of doubt. Is this site still active? Is this business legitimate? Even if they recover and keep browsing, you've damaged trust in that moment.
- Search engine rankings. Google uses broken links as a signal of site quality. A site with lots of broken links ranks lower than an equivalent site with none. Over time this compounds — worse rankings mean less traffic, which means fewer customers.
- Lost conversions. In e-commerce, every broken link is a potential sale lost. In services, it's a prospect who couldn't find the information they needed. You can't even measure this cost, because you never hear about the sales you didn't make.
The DIY approach (and why it doesn't work)
You could manually check your links — download a spreadsheet of every URL on your site and click through each one. Roughly, this takes:
- A small site (50 pages): 2–3 hours
- A medium site (500 pages): 20+ hours
- A large site (5,000+ pages): weeks of work
And that's just the first pass. To stay on top of broken links, you'd need to repeat this monthly. Or hire someone to do it — which costs money and still only happens on a fixed schedule, not when problems actually occur.
The right way: automated monitoring
The better approach is to let software do what software does best: repetitive checking without human error. A good link monitoring tool will:
- Crawl your entire website and check every link automatically
- Run on a schedule, so you're never more than a day or two from knowing about a break
- Alert you immediately when something breaks, before customers see it
- Generate clear reports that track link health over time
What to look for in a link monitoring tool
Not all link checkers are created equal. Here's what actually matters:
- Scheduled scans, not manual runs — set it once and it runs automatically
- Clear, actionable reports — you need to know exactly where the problem is, not just that one exists
- Affordable — this is a solved problem and shouldn't cost hundreds a month
- Easy to use — no complex configuration or steep learning curve
How to do this right, starting today
- Pick a tool and run your first scan. See how many broken links you actually have — the number might surprise you.
- Set up scheduled monitoring. Weekly or monthly, depending on how often your content changes.
- Fix the critical ones first. Prioritize your homepage, product pages, and high-traffic pages.
- Keep monitoring. Once the backlog is clean, automated checks stop it from building up again.
The whole process takes maybe 30 minutes to set up. The payoff — better SEO, better customer experience, fewer lost sales — compounds over time.
The bottom line
You probably have broken links on your website right now. You just don't know about them. And that's costing you.
The solution isn't to manually check every link — it's to automate the checking and get alerted the moment something breaks. It's simple, it's cheap, and it's the only way to actually stay on top of the problem.