A broken link is a hyperlink that leads nowhere useful, because the page or file it points to has been moved, renamed or deleted. Instead of the content the visitor expected, they hit an error, most often a 404. It is one of the most common and most quietly damaging issues on a website.
Picture a phone book where half the numbers have been disconnected. You look someone up, dial confidently, and reach a dead tone. That is what a broken link feels like to a visitor, and it erodes trust fast. Broken links usually surface a 404 page, which is fine as a safety net but a poor substitute for working content. When you delete or rename a page, the right fix is a 301 redirect that quietly forwards the old address to the new one.
Links break in two flavours. Internal links point inside your own site and are fully in your control. External links point to other people’s sites, which can vanish without warning. Tools like Google Search Console report broken links it finds while crawling, so you do not have to click every link by hand. A monthly check is usually enough for a small site. The damage is rarely dramatic and that is exactly why it slips by. One dead button in a navigation menu, a broken link in a popular blog post, a checkout step that 404s, and a steady trickle of visitors quietly gives up before they reach the thing you wanted them to find.
At TopDevs we run automated link checks on the sites we build and maintain, so dead ends get caught and redirected before a customer ever stumbles into one.
