Find The Dead Links Before They Cost You A Sale

How I Actually Work: A Writer’s Tools and System in 2026 — The desk, the apps, and the weekly upkeep that keeps a one-person shop running without rot. Link checks live in here, next to everything else that breaks if you stop looking.

The 20-Minute Link Audit

A dead buy button is a sale you already lost and never saw leave.

You’re going to walk every important link on your site and store, catch the broken and the wrong ones, and fix them before a buyer hits one and bounces. Twenty minutes, free tools, no developer. Here’s the drill.

1 // Crawl your own site

Paste your homepage URL into a free scanner. brokenlinkcheck.com takes no signup: enter the URL, run it, and it walks your pages and flags every link returning a non-200 status. Small site, skip the tool and open your nav and product list in tabs by hand. Either way you end with one list: every URL that loads, every one that fails.

2 // Separate dead from wrong

Two columns. Column one is 404s and timeouts: links pointing at a page that died. Column two is the sneaky kind, links that load fine but land wrong, an old product page, last year’s pricing, a draft you never deleted. The crawler catches column one. Column two you catch by reading where each link actually goes, not what the anchor text promises.

3 // Fix or redirect each one

Dead internal link with a real replacement page: swap the href to the live URL. Page that is gone for good but still pulls traffic: set a 301 redirect to the closest live page so the visitor and the link juice both land somewhere. On most hosts that is a one-line rule in your redirects panel or .htaccess. Wrong-target links from column two: repoint them to the page they should have hit.

4 // Click-test the top 5 buy paths

Now the part that touches money. Open the 5 paths a buyer actually takes: every checkout button, every Gumroad link, the link in your email signature, your pinned social post, your link-in-bio. Click each one cold, like a stranger who found you today. Each one has to reach a live page where the price is right and the button charges money. A redirect that resolves but dumps you on a sold-out or archived listing still fails.

5 // Set the recheck date

Links rot on their own clock, so put the next audit on the calendar before you close the tab. Monthly covers a small store. Drop a repeating event on the first Monday, and log a one-line note of what you fixed today. Next month you start from the known-good list, not from zero.

Standard: zero 404s on any page in your nav, and all 5 buy paths reach a live page that charges the correct price. Anything short of that, you are not done.

Crawl now. Click the buy buttons last. You will know your store is clean before lunch.

Found a dead button you’d been live with for weeks? Tell me what it was costing. I read every one. ~ J.D.