What causes broken links on a website & what you need to do to fix it
Websites are dynamic, they act as gateway to the business – not only providing information but include links to social channels, registrations & embedded videos for example.
This means that any change to the external providers / links will affect your website and it is not fixed you will have broken elements or links on your site.
Here are a few examples to what can happen:
Social media URL / name:
If your social media profile is linked form your site, any change to the name / URL will needs to be updated on your site – otherwise the link will be broken.
Note: On Squarespace if you set up a ‘connected account’ for an Instagram feed for example and changed your login, this needs to be updated on Squarespace as otherwise the feed will not work.
Email signup form
If you have a link to register to a newsletter (with for example Mail Chimp) or an embedded form and you updated the list name on mail chimp the form will not work unless you update it on your website.
Event Bookings:
Is using Eventbrite or another event provider and update your event name / URL, make sure you update your website. Therefore, it is always good to also link to your Eventbrite company page which should stay the same.
Embedded calendar
If you are using an embedded Google calendar for example and you updated the account or changed a calendar from public to private, it will not work on your website.
Embedded videos
If you embed videos from YouTube or Vimeo on your website and update video name or change settings for your channel (for example make it private) videos will not work on your site.
Payment gateway
For online shops that use a payment gateway like Stripe or PayPal – if you update login you must check the site integration as in most cased you will need to re-log in to connect.
External links to other website
If you are linking to a company site or partners or even reference for articles, if they change the URL to the page your link will be broken.
This can happen even if a site changed the security status and added / removed SSL as the URL changed from http to https – best to change and make sure the link still works.
Online forms
A few things can happen with a form – two examples are:
Change of email address – your email does not work so you must update the email on your form
Google Catptia – if you are using Catptia on your form to prevent spam any update to their tool can cause issues on your form. When Google has rolled a big update on Captia in 2017, all forms stopped working and were required re-development.
