Every nonprofit website develops broken links over time. Pages get deleted, URLs change after a redesign, external sites go offline, and old blog posts link to resources that no longer exist. None of this is anyone's fault, but it all adds up to a real cost if it isn't addressed regularly.
They damage credibility immediately
When a visitor clicks a link and hits a 404 page, their first reaction is usually one of three things: confusion, frustration, or doubt. If the broken link is on your homepage, your About page, or your donation page, the damage is amplified because those are the pages visitors use to evaluate your organization.
An organization that can't keep its own website working raises questions about whether it can manage other things well. That's an unfair inference, but it's a real one that visitors make in the moment.
They can interrupt the donation flow
The most costly broken link on any nonprofit site is one that sits in the path between a willing donor and the donation form. If your "Donate Now" button links to a page that no longer exists, if a campaign page that was promoted in an email now returns a 404, or if the payment processor redirect fails, you lose donations that were already in motion.
These links are especially important to check before any major campaign, email blast, or fundraising push. A link that was working three months ago may not be working today.
They signal neglect to search engines
Google crawls your site and follows links to understand its structure. When it encounters a high number of broken links, it can interpret this as a signal that the site is poorly maintained. Over time, this can modestly reduce your search rankings, particularly for pages that have many inbound broken links pointing to them.
More directly, any external sites linking to a page on your site that no longer exists are sending visitors who will bounce immediately on the 404 page. That's lost traffic and a wasted referral.
Common causes of broken links on nonprofit sites
Understanding where broken links come from makes them easier to prevent:
- Website redesigns that change URL structures without setting up redirects
- Deleting pages without updating or removing links that point to them
- Linking to external resources (partner websites, news articles, grant portals) that have since moved or disappeared
- Migrating from one platform to another without preserving old URLs
- Staff turnover where no one knows which old pages are still linked from other pages
How to find broken links
There are several free tools that will crawl your site and return a list of every broken link. Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 URLs), Google Search Console, and browser extensions like Check My Links can all surface broken links quickly.
A website health audit will also surface broken links as part of a broader review, organized by severity and location, so you can prioritize the most impactful ones first.
A GoodSiteReport Website Health Audit finds every broken link on your site and tells you exactly where they appear, what they were supposed to link to, and what to do to fix them.
What to do when you find them
For internal broken links (links from one page on your site to another), the fix is usually straightforward: update the link to the correct URL or remove it if the destination page no longer exists. If a page was moved or renamed, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one so that any bookmarks or external links still work.
For external broken links (links pointing to other websites), you have two options: find the new URL for the resource and update the link, or remove the link entirely. Linking to a dead resource is worse than not linking at all.