Broken links look small until a prospect hits a dead pricing PDF or a docs page that 404s mid-onboarding. Link rot is inevitable; undetected link rot is a process failure.
What “broken” really means
- Hard failures: 404, 410, DNS errors, connection timeouts.
- Auth walls and 401/403 on public marketing URLs — often accidental.
- Soft-404s that return 200 with an error page.
- Broken assets: images, scripts, and stylesheets that fail to load.
Where to look first
- Primary navigation, footer, and homepage CTAs.
- Docs, blog posts, and changelog archives — they rot fastest.
- Sitemap URLs vs. what the site actually links to.
- External vendor links (status pages, signup flows) that change without notice.
A sane operating rhythm
Crawl high-value paths weekly. After large content migrations, run a full pass. Fix by priority: revenue and support paths first, then long-tail content. Prefer redirects over deleting popular URLs when content moves.
- Replace or redirect dead URLs; don’t leave “coming soon” forever.
- Update internal links at the source — not only via blanket redirects.
- Track repeat offenders (templates that emit bad hrefs).
- Alert on spikes in 404 rates after deploys.
Health Mesh coverage scans follow links from your site, classify failures, and help you catch regressions before customers file tickets.