Website Click Audit: Find Dead Links in 5 Minutes
Dead links don’t send an alert when they appear. They sit quietly on pages you published months or years ago, pointing to URLs that no longer exist, while real visitors click them, hit a 404, and leave without you ever knowing. By the time the pattern shows up in your bounce rate or your rankings, the losses have been compounding for a while.
A website click audit is simply the habit of checking where your clickable elements actually lead and whether they still work. It doesn’t require a subscription to a large SEO platform, and it doesn’t take a morning. The process below works on any site and takes about five minutes once you know the steps.
Start with Google Search Console (it’s already done half the work)
If your site is verified in Google Search Console, GSC has been logging broken URLs the whole time. Go to Pages in the left menu, select Not Indexed, then look for Not Found (404). That list is every URL Google tried to crawl and found missing: dead internal links, outdated page URLs, destinations that moved without a redirect. Click any entry and use Inspect URL to see which pages are still pointing to it, so you know exactly where to go and fix the source.
The GSC Performance report adds a useful second layer. Cross-reference your 404 URLs against your click data: if a broken URL is still receiving clicks from search results, you’re losing visitors through a page that no longer exists.
Run a free crawl on your key pages
For anything GSC misses, such as broken outbound links to third-party sites, a free tool like Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs), the Broken Link Checker at brokenlinkcheck.com, or Ahrefs Webmaster Tools will crawl your pages and return HTTP status codes for every link it finds. Screaming Frog is particularly useful because it works like a search engine crawler, following every link it encounters and flagging the response code for each one, so you get internal and external issues in the same pass.
If you use WordPress, the Broken Link Checker plugin monitors links continuously and flags new breakages as they appear, which removes the need to remember to run a manual crawl at all.
Prioritise by traffic, not by count
A broken link on an old blog post from three years ago and a broken link on your pricing page are not the same problem, even though both show up as a single 404 in a report. Fix the high-traffic, high-intent pages first. A broken link on a homepage or in a checkout flow can block users from reaching conversion pages entirely, which is a rather different level of damage from a dead link buried in an archive post.
Export your crawl results into a spreadsheet, add a column for estimated monthly traffic from GSC or GA4, sort by that column rather than the error list’s default order, and work down from the top.
Three fixes, one decision
Once you have your prioritised list, every broken link needs exactly one of three responses:
- Update the link, if the destination page still exists but moved, update the href to the correct URL. Simple, and always the right default for internal links.
- Set up a 301 redirect, if the page is gone but equivalent content exists, redirect the old URL to the closest live equivalent. Match intent, not just topic; a redirect to an unrelated page is treated by Google as a soft 404 and passes no benefit.
- Remove the link entirely, if there is no relevant destination and no replacement content worth creating, delete the anchor. A removed link causes no harm; a broken one does.
One thing worth avoiding: blanket-redirecting every 404 to the homepage. It looks tidy in a report, but Google reads it as a soft-404 redirect chain, the homepage absorbs no authority from it, and the users who followed those links still end up somewhere unhelpful.
Make it a five-minute monthly habit
Link rot is gradual by nature, as pages move, third-party sites go dark, and old campaign URLs expire, so a single audit cleans up today’s problems but does nothing for next month’s. A quick monthly check of GSC’s Pages report, paired with a crawl of your five or ten highest-traffic pages, catches issues before they accumulate. For content-heavy sites with a lot of outbound links, a fortnightly check is more sensible.
After you fix a broken URL, use the Validate Fix button in Google Search Console to notify Google, which prompts a recheck on the next crawl rather than waiting for the standard crawl cycle to catch up.