How Do I Find Broken Links and 404 Pages Hurting My Store?

Find broken links and 404 pages by combining three views: a crawl of your own site for dead internal links, Google Search Console for URLs Google cannot find, and real shopper sessions showing which broken URLs people actually hit. Fix the ones on high-traffic, high-intent paths first.

A 404 is a page the server cannot find. A few are harmless, such as an old blog post nobody visits. Others quietly cost sales: a navigation link that leads nowhere, a product URL that changed with no redirect, or an expired campaign link that paid traffic still lands on. This guide explains how to find them and which ones deserve attention first.

How do you find broken links and 404 pages on an ecommerce site?

No single method catches everything, which is why it helps to use three. Each shows a different kind of problem, and together they separate harmless clutter from links that cost orders.

Where do most ecommerce 404s come from?

Most come from change: a product removed or renamed, a collection restructured, a URL handle edited without a redirect, a migration or replatforming, a campaign link that expired, or a typo in a menu or banner. External sites linking to old URLs add to the list. This is why a post-release check matters, as covered in our guide on release monitoring for ecommerce. A product page that loads but offers no way forward is a related problem, covered in finding out-of-stock and dead-end product pages.

Which broken links matter most?

Rank them by how much money the shopper had at stake when they hit the error. A 404 behind a top navigation link, a paid ad or a product listing deserves attention before a 404 on a page nobody visits. A broken image on a product page or a failing request in checkout can matter as much as a missing page.

How should you fix a broken link?

If the page still exists, correct the link. If the content moved, add a redirect to the closest relevant page. If the content is gone with no replacement, a clear 404 page that offers search and top categories is better than redirecting everything to the home page, which can confuse shoppers and search engines. After you change anything, recrawl and check the report again. Our guide to HTTP 40x errors explains the status code family, and HTTP status 0 covers a different failure that looks similar in reports.

How can Noibu help?

Noibu detects HTTP, JavaScript, GraphQL and image errors that shoppers encounter and ties them to the sessions and revenue they affected, with session replay so you can see what the shopper saw. That helps you rank issues by cost rather than by count, and the Bug Resolution Agent identifies the top issues for the team to review, with a person approving any change before it ships. Over 90% of website errors are never reported, according to Noibu platform data, so waiting for customers to tell you is not a plan. See what is affecting your store with the free website audit, or read about ecommerce error monitoring for the wider picture.

Noibu is AI for ecommerce operations, the always-on optimization system that keeps online stores running at their best. A team of supervised AI agents finds what's broken, slow, or leaking revenue, does the work, and hands results back for human approval. Trusted by retailers like Free People, Guess, Liquid I.V., and Ariat.

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