The Impact of Broken Links on User Experience and What to Do About It
It can be frustrating when you're looking up some information or a product, and your browser brings up a broken link message instead of taking you directly to the desired destination. Nobody likes dealing with broken links on their website, especially if they affect the user experience negatively. As a business owner, you need to keep in mind that users hate them, too. That's why it's important to take the necessary steps to fix them.
If you have a website with many pages, the chances of having broken links increase significantly since there are a lot of pages that might need an update at some point. Fixing them is important for both SEO purposes and to maintain a good user experience for your website's visitors. You can trust website backlink audit services to help you improve your site by removing any dead links and improving the site authority score.
In this article, we'll discuss how to identify broken links on your website and how backlink audit services can help you fix them!
Broken Links
A broken link is a link that leads to a page that has either been deleted or moved, so the page is no longer available. When you open a page, you may see an error message that says "404 - File not found" or something similar. Usually, this happens because the URL of the web page has changed for some reason or another. However, it can also be caused by other reasons, such as a problem with the server or user error when entering the web address into the browser.
Let's look at how broken links can impact your website's visitors.
Impact on User Experience
You may think that a broken link may go unnoticed or that most visitors would just move on to another page on your website, but that's not the case. Reports show that 88% of users expect a website to load within two seconds or less, and if they have to wait longer than that, they're most likely to abandon it and look for another option. So if your website loads slowly because of broken links, it will affect your users' experience. Here's how:
Confusion
If a visitor clicks on a link and ends up getting an error page, they'll be confused as they may not understand why this has happened. This can lead to a negative user experience and may even cause them to leave your website altogether.
Causing Frustration
When users try to click on a link on your site, and it doesn't work, they can become frustrated and assume that something is wrong with your website. Online consumers are accustomed to clicking on links to access the information they need right away, so when they hit a dead end or get a message that the link is broken, it can cause them to question the quality of your content or even your brand as a whole. If users abandon your website for this reason, chances are they will never return.
Loss of Trust
Broken links also have the potential to affect your website's credibility in the eyes of your visitors. If a user finds multiple broken links on your site, they may believe that you are incapable of maintaining a proper online presence and may look elsewhere for a solution. Not fixing the broken links can make your website appear outdated, unprofessional, and unreliable.
Decreased Usability
A website with broken links can make it difficult for users to navigate the different sections of the site and find what they are looking for. If people cannot use the website properly, they may get frustrated and abandon the site in search of a better alternative. This will reduce your website's usability and lead to a poor user experience.
How to Fix a Broken Link
If you come across a broken link on your site, here are some things you should do:
Backlink Audit Services
Hiring professional help to review your backlinks will be the most effective method to ensure there are no broken links on your site. Backlink audit services can scan your entire site and provide you with a report of all the links on your site that are broken and need to be fixed. Once you've received this report, you can manually go through each of the links and re-set them or hire another service to perform the fixes for you.
From an SEO perspective, broken links are a huge red flag to search engines and can negatively affect your site's ranking in search results. Audit services will be able to find and fix all of the broken links on your site to improve your SEO performance.
Checking for Broken Links Regularly
Make sure to regularly check your site for broken links to ensure your site is functioning properly and is meeting user expectations. There are certain tools online that can be used to scan your site to check for broken links and allow you to easily find and fix them. This way, you won't risk leaving your site vulnerable to broken links that could impact your users' experience.
Make Sure the Website is Updated
If you're an e-commerce business, you absolutely need to ensure that your website is always up to date, as it could be one of the primary reasons users visit your site in the first place. Keep all the software and plugins on your site updated to function correctly and avoid any security risks that could damage the site's reputation.
If you're running a website and looking for a website backup audit service to fix your backlinks and take care of any potential problems on your site, you can count on Search Berg to get the job done. From manual backlink audits to advanced link management services, they do it all.
This guest article was written by Hannah Doyle, a digital marketing SEO specialist at SearchBerg. She has spent more than seven years in the online marketing industry and has worked with many leading brands to help them grow their business and improve their performance. Backlink audit is just one of the many services offered by the company to help their clients improve their SEO performance and attract more visitors to their site.
