Links on the website’s busiest pages lead to pages of the same website that answer with an error. Visitors hit a dead end, and search engines waste their visits on pages that don’t exist.
What it means
At least one internal link answers “404 Not Found”, “410 Gone” or a server error (5xx). The action shows the number of broken links and an example with its status code; the website’s page lists up to five, each with the page it was found on.
What triggers it
Once a week, as part of Uptime monitoring, SaaSMaestro collects the links to your own website from the home page and the five busiest landing pages, and follows up to 40 of them. Links that time out aren’t counted, since that’s often just a slow server. Broken links raise a Medium issue.
Common causes
- Pages that were deleted, renamed or moved without a redirect.
- Typos in links, or links hard-coded in menus, footers and templates.
- Pages that fail with a server error, for example after a plugin or code update.
How to fix it
- Open the website’s Website health section to see the broken links and the pages they’re on.
- Update or remove each link, or redirect the missing page to the closest live page.
- For server errors, load the page yourself and check the server’s error log.
When it clears
The issue goes at the next weekly link check that finds no broken links.
After 7 days without the problem, the action drops off the board. If you marked it done and the problem is still detected 14 days later, it returns as “Fix didn’t work”.