The problem
Remember when you were browsing through an interesting website and just when you clicked on a link that was supposed to answer your burning question, you got the message:
How annoying is that? It’s also not very user friendly. Most of the time in these cases I’m immediately done with such a site and click away to start browsing for another one.
What does ‘404 Not Found’ mean?
It means that the page (information) you were looking for doesn’t exist anymore or has been moved to another location without the link being adjusted. In internet terms this is what is called a broken or dead link.
What are the consequences?
Having broken or dead links on your website can lead to:
- Visitors (= potential customers) getting annoyed and leaving your site and your business.
- A lower ranking in Google, because it affects the SEO (search engine optimization) of your site. And a lower ranking means that it’s harder for customers to find your site and your business.
- Hackers redirecting your site to for example a scammy sales page or a porn site. This also means losing customers.
The solution
So in order to avoid these consequences, you have to make sure that your site doesn’t have these broken or dead links. However, checking your site manually for such links can be a lot of time-consuming work, depending on the amount of content you already have on your site.
Another, easier way to find the links which will save you a lot of time is to use a plugin. The plugin we use is:
After you have found the broken or dead links you can solve them as follows:
- Go to your WordPress admin dashboard
- Go to Settings and click on Permalinks
- Click on the button Save Changes (without having changed anything)
When you save your unchanged permalinks settings, WordPress rebuilds your .htaccess file (=hidden plain text files that are on the server to help control how your visitors interact with your website). By doing this it almost always fixes 404 errors on Posts.
Site maintenance
The solving of the broken or dead links is part of the maintenance of your site. As I have said, it’s necessary in order for visitors (= potential customers) to find your site and stay on it and also to prevent hackers from messing with your site.
When you’re a startup and have a small business you may have the time to do this maintenance all by yourself. But when your business starts to grow, it’s possible that you don’t have the time to do it anymore. That’s the moment we might come in handy. For a small monthly fee we take care of your site maintenance while you take care of your customers and your business. Want to know more about it? Click on our maintenance plans.
If you have any other question about maintenance, feel free to ask them below or contact us.
You can also check our blog or get our free WordPress Website Maintenance download.