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Why Broken Links Are Costing You Jobs You Never Hear About
A homeowner who hits a dead page rarely emails to tell you — they just leave, quietly, mid-decision, and you never find out it happened.
Your audit crawls every page it can reach on your site — not just the homepage — and checks every internal link along the way. A broken link buried on a service-area page or an old gallery post doesn't just look sloppy; it's a dead end a homeowner can hit while actively trying to learn more about you, right when their interest was building.
Why this check crawls your whole site, not just the homepage
Most contractor sites get their homepage checked constantly (it's the page you look at) and their inner pages — service areas, individual service pages, an older gallery post — checked almost never. Links rot quietly over time: a page gets renamed, a gallery plugin gets swapped out, a service-area page gets restructured, and whatever used to point to it now leads nowhere. Your audit checks every reachable page specifically because that's where broken links actually accumulate.
A dead end mid-decision is worse than it looks
Think about when a homeowner clicks a link on your site: they're not idly browsing, they're actively trying to confirm you serve their area, or trying to see more of a specific job. A broken link at that exact moment reads as "this business doesn't maintain its own website" — a bad signal to send someone who's about to hand over a few thousand dollars for a floor coating job with no way to preview the result beforehand.
It costs you with Google too, just less directly
Every broken internal link is also a dead end for Google's crawler — a page it can't follow through to, and a small signal that the site isn't well maintained. It's a smaller effect than the homeowner-facing one, but it stacks with everything else your audit measures under Site structure.
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Free audit shows you exactly what's costing you jobs on your own site — no obligation.
Related
FAQ
How do broken links happen if I never touched that page?
Almost always indirectly — a plugin update, a gallery re-organization, a page rename elsewhere on the site, or a linked page that got deleted. Link rot accumulates passively even on a site nobody is actively breaking.
Does one broken link really matter?
One is a minor ding. The real risk is that broken links are rarely a single, isolated event — if your audit found one, it's worth checking whether older or less-visited pages have several.