Broken Link Fix List Worksheet

A crawl export is a list of facts, not a list of work. It tells you that a URL returned a 404 or sat at the end of a redirect chain, but it does not say who should fix it, what the fix is, or which of the three hundred rows matters this week. This worksheet closes that gap. Each row is one failing URL with the pages that link to it, what the server actually returns, the fix in plain words, an owner, a priority with the reason written next to it, and the date and crawl run that confirmed the fix. The example rows cover the cases that show up in almost every audit: a retired page linked from the navigation, a two-hop chain, a soft 404 on an out-of-stock product, a dead external link, a timed-out download, a footer link that costs a hop on every page, a server error, empty pagination, and old http links. Replace them with your own.

Fill it in from the grouped findings rather than the raw export, so the same broken URL linked from forty pages becomes one row with forty sources instead of forty rows. Our article on exporting an audit your developer will actually use, at /blog/export-audit-developer-will-use/, explains that grouping and the columns a developer wants to see. If a row is a page that loads but says nothing useful, the article on 404s vs soft 404s at /blog/404s-vs-soft-404s/ will help you decide what it should return instead, and the one on reading a redirect chain map at /blog/reading-redirect-chain-map/ covers the chain rows. To argue for the high-priority rows, the Broken Link Revenue Loss Calculator at /tools/broken-link-revenue-loss/ puts a monthly figure on the sessions leaking through them.