Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

When Good Links Go Bad

Now that you’ve learned all the ways to build links, it’s a good time to consider what can go wrong. Links that go to pages on the same site can break when you rename or move files or folders. Links to other websites are particularly fragile; they can break at any time, without warning. You won’t know that anything’s gone wrong until you click the link and get a “Page Not Found” error message.

Broken links are so common that web developers have coined a term to describe how websites gradually lose their linking abilities: link rot. Sadly, you can upload a perfectly working website today and return a few months later to find that many of its external links have died off. They point to websites that no longer exist, have moved, or have been rearranged.

Link rot is an insidious problem because it reduces visitor confidence in your site. They see a page that promises to lead them to other interesting resources, but when they click a link, they’re disappointed. Experienced visitors won’t stay long at a site that’s suffering from an advanced case of link rot—they’ll assume you haven’t updated your site in a while and move on to a snazzier site somewhere else.

So how can you reduce the problem of broken links? First, you should rigorously test all your internal links—the ones that point to pages within your own site. Check for minor errors that can stop a link from working, and travel every path at least once. Leading web page editors include built-in tools that automate ...