Preventing and fixing broken links

Broken links are one of the leading causes of user frustration when navigating a website. And more often than not, web users associate their web experience with the brand or organization itself, meaning an unreliable website equals an unreliable institution. Needless to say, this is an important topic when thinking about the quality of content on a university website.

Common causes of broken links

The most common causes of broken links are:

  • Deleting, moving, or renaming pages or PDFs on the Millersville website
  • Outdated links to external pages (websites outside of the Millersville website)

Preventing broken links

Screenshot of a warning in Cascade CMS about page relationships

The easiest way to solve a broken link problem is to avoid creating one to start with. If you are considering deleting, moving or renaming a page or PDF, think about the following:

  • Is your page part of a navigation menu? If the page you’re altering or deleting is part of a navigation menu, don’t forget to republish any pages which include said menu. Otherwise, your link will remain in the navigation, and will lead to an error page when clicked.
  • You may not be aware of all the links to your page. There could be other departments, or even sites outside of Millersville (not to mention search engines) linking to your page. Try to consider the implications altering or deleting your page may have.
  • Replace instead of replicating. If you have a PDF that is updated each semester, consider overwriting the previous file rather than deleting it. This will prevent a broken link, as well as helping the user find the most current information.
  • Is it worth the move? There may be pages or documents on your site that seem disorganized or out of order. We’re all for organization, but please consider the implications moving your page may have on our broken link count before restructuring.

Detecting broken links

We have several tools at our disposal to aid us in detecting broken links on the Millersville website. The most robust of these is Siteimprove, which is a reporting tool that crawls the entire university website searching for issues with accessibility, content quality and more.

Screenshot of Siteimprove data showing increasing and decreasing broken link counts
Siteimprove tracks increasing and decreasing broken link counts.

You may receive a report from us if we find there are numerous broken links on the pages you are responsible for, or you can reach out to us through the help desk to request a report.

Fixing broken links

If you do end up with broken links on your website, there are a few routes you can take to fix the problem:

  • Remove the link: If the link is no longer relevant, this is the simplest route to fixing your broken link.
  • Remove the page: If you find the page containing the link is outdated or no longer needed, this is a great time to remove the page, link included. Just remember to consider what could be linking to this page or you may create more broken links in the process.
  • Replace the broken link with a working link: If a page you are linking to has moved and you can find the new URL, simply replace your broken link with the correct one.

The content of this blog entry was accurate at the time of publication. You can find the most current information about linking and other Cascade-related topics in our Cascade wiki documentation.


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