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A broken link is a link that points to a page that no longer exists. The visitor lands on an error instead of the content they wanted. On an online store, it usually shows up as a “404 Not Found” page. The usual trigger is a product that was deleted, renamed, or moved.
A broken link works by asking a server for a page the server can’t find. The server answers with an error code, usually 404, and the visitor sees an error page instead of a product.
Every web address is like a street address on an envelope. When the house is demolished, the letter still arrives at the right street, but nobody is home to receive it.
A 404 status code is the server saying the address exists in your link, but not on the site. A 410 status code says the same thing more firmly, meaning the page is gone for good.
On top of that, search engines react to the error. Google’s own documentation says its indexing pipeline removes a previously indexed URL once it returns a 404. So the product page that used to rank quietly drops out of search results.
Broken links come in two types. Internal broken links sit on your own pages. A menu item pointing at a deleted product is one example. External broken links are links from other sites, emails, or ads that point at an old URL on your store.
Store migrations and bulk imports break links because they change URLs faster than anyone updates the links pointing at them. A single settings change can rename hundreds of addresses at once.
In WooCommerce, a product’s URL comes from its slug plus your permalink settings. The slug is the short name ending the address. Change the category base, the product base, or the slug, and the old address stops resolving.
The riskiest moment is a WooCommerce migration. Products get recreated on the new store, often with slightly different slugs or a different URL structure. Even so, every ad, email, and backlink built over years still points at the old addresses.
Bulk CSV imports, however, cause a smaller version of the same problem. For example, an import that overwrites product names can regenerate slugs. Likewise, a tidy-up that deletes discontinued items leaves every link to them dangling.
A broken link costs a store the visit it was supposed to deliver. A shopper who clicked a product link expected that product. An error page gives them an easy reason to leave.
That said, site errors already push shoppers away at checkout. Baymard’s survey found 17% of shoppers abandoned an order because the website had errors or crashed.
Paid traffic makes it even sharper. A Google Shopping listing that points at a dead product URL wastes the click. On top of that, Merchant Center can disapprove the product. The AdTribes guide on fixing disapproved products lists 404 landing pages as one of those disapproval causes.
Meanwhile, backlinks lose their value. A supplier blog linking to a 404 passes nothing useful to the page you want to rank.
Preventing broken links is cheaper than chasing them later. The simplest habit is to treat every URL change as a two-step job. Change the URL, then redirect the old one.
Before a migration, export every product and category URL from the old store. Then build the redirect map while both versions still exist, so each match can be checked by hand.
After the move, review your internal linking in menus, footers, and product descriptions. In practice, these hand-typed links are the ones that slip through. Finally, re-check Search Console a few weeks later, once Google has recrawled the old addresses.
Broken links are the normal state of the web, not a rare accident. Pew Research Center studied just under one million webpages sampled from Common Crawl archives.
Pew found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible a decade later. Even government and news pages carried links to pages that had disappeared.
Meanwhile, links pointing into sites decay just as fast. Ahrefs looked at the link profiles of over 2 million domains. It found that 66.5% of the links built to those sites since 2013 are now dead.
For a store, the lesson is simple. Links break by default over time, so checking for them has to be a routine job rather than a one-off.
A broken link in practice looks like a busy product page suddenly turning into an error screen. Here’s a hypothetical example.
Imagine a garden supply store called Fernhill that moves to a new WooCommerce build. The team wants cleaner addresses, so they change the category base during the move.
Before the move, the planter category lived at /product-category/planters/. After the move, it lives at /planters/. The new store looks great, and every product works when you click through the menu.
However, Fernhill had 180 product and category URLs indexed in search. It also had a year of email campaigns and a handful of supplier blogs linking to the old addresses.
Within a few weeks, the owner notices organic visits to planters falling. Search Console starts listing the old URLs as “Not found (404).”
Say 400 visitors a month used to reach planters through old links. If Fernhill converts 2% of them at a $60 average order, that’s 8 orders. That’s roughly $480 a month walking into an error page.
Still, nothing in the WooCommerce admin flags it. No order fails, because the shopper never gets far enough to place one.
First, Fernhill exports the full list of old URLs from a backup of the previous store. Next, the team pairs each old URL with its closest new match in a two-column sheet.
Then they load those pairs as permanent 301 redirects. Discontinued products point to their category, not the homepage. Google’s site-move guidance says to keep redirects generally at least 1 year, so the rules stay in place.
As a result, old links land on real pages again. The planter rankings then start to recover over the following weeks.
A broken link returns an honest error code. By contrast, a soft 404 returns a normal “OK” page with nothing useful on it.
| What you’re comparing | Broken Link | Soft 404 |
|---|---|---|
| What the server says | 404 or 410 error | 200 OK, as if the page works |
| What the visitor sees | An error page | An empty or near-empty page |
| Usual store cause | Deleted or renamed product | Empty category or redirect to the homepage |
| Where you spot it | Search Console “Not found” report | Search Console “Soft 404” report |
Both problems waste the visit. However, a soft 404 is harder to catch, because nothing looks broken to a quick check. Google’s migration guidance warns against redirecting many old URLs to the homepage. Search can treat that pattern as a soft 404.
So the fixes differ. Fix a broken link with a redirect to a relevant page. Fix a soft 404 by adding real content or returning a proper error code.
Broken links don’t trigger a sitewide penalty. The harm is page-level: Google drops a URL that returns a 404 from its index. Any backlinks pointing at that URL stop helping the page you want to rank. Redirecting the old URL to a relevant page keeps that value working.
Start with Google Search Console, which lists URLs that return “Not found (404)” in its page indexing report. Then run a site crawler over your store to catch internal links in menus and product descriptions. Check again after any migration, bulk import, or permalink change.
Redirect it when a close replacement exists, like a newer version or the product’s own category. Let it return a 404 or 410 when nothing relevant replaces it. Avoid sending every deleted product to the homepage, because Google can treat that as a soft 404.
Broken links matter because they quietly waste traffic you already paid for or earned. Every store migration, import, or product clean-up can create them. A redirect map and a regular check keep old links working as the catalogue changes.
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