Last week, we introduced our four-part October blog series on basic website management and talked about the importance of page speed. Now that you’ve ensured your pages load as past as possible to keep people on your site, it’s time to ensure dead links aren’t frustrating potential customers.

What Are Dead Links?
Dead links are broken links. When someone clicks on them, they don’t go anywhere other than a potential 404 page, letting someone know the page in question can’t be found or no longer exists.

Why Are Dead Links Bad?
You’ve probably used the internet long enough to know that dead links happen. Click through enough times and you’ll run into the inevitable 404 error. One or two bad links on your entire website aren’t likely to ruin your entire home improvement marketing effort—unless those links are in important locations.

The CTA link on your landing page must work, for example. Otherwise, consumers won’t know where to go to take the next step in ordering windows or getting a quote for service. You can’t rely on the consumer to search the rest of your site for that information. They’re more likely to leave your page and find another provider with links that work.

And if you have many broken links, your site can become too frustrating for consumers to navigate. That can also send them to the competition, as close to 90 percent of people say they won’t return to a website after having a poor user experience.

Broken links also make it difficult for SEO bots to crawl your website, which can impact indexing of your pages. The poor behavioral metrics that come from users leaving your site and not returning can also negatively impact your page rank.

Fixing Dead Links to Improvement Onsite Home Improvement Marketing
Luckily, fixing dead links is as easy as removing them or updating the URL to a page that works. The hardest part is finding the dead links to being with, and you can use a site such as deadlinkchecker.com for that purpose. Simply enter your URL and click check, and the site finds and checks all links so you can fix the ones that don’t work.