Broken links are one of those problems that feel minor until you audit your site and find 30 of them.

A 404 error isn't just a bad user experience. It wastes crawl budget. When Google's crawler hits a broken link, it follows a dead end instead of discovering useful content. More practically: if another site links to a page on your site that now returns a 404, you're losing the value of that backlink entirely.

Where broken links come from on Webflow sites: you renamed a slug without setting up a redirect; you deleted a CMS item that was linked to from other pages; you linked to an external page that no longer exists; you changed your URL structure during a redesign.

How to find them. Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) will crawl your site and list every URL returning a 4xx error. Export the report, filter for 404s, and look at the inlinks column to see which pages are linking to each broken URL. SEMrush's Site Audit does the same automatically and flags broken internal and external links in one report.

In Google Search Console, the Coverage report's "Not Found (404)" section shows pages that were previously indexed and now return 404s. These are the most important to fix because Google had already given them attention.

How to fix them in Webflow. If you deleted a page that used to exist, add a 301 redirect in Webflow Settings under Publishing → Redirects. If the page still exists but the link is wrong, find the link in the Designer or CMS editor and update the URL. For external links pointing to pages that no longer exist, find the updated URL or remove the link.

Run this check monthly. Broken links accumulate over time, especially on sites with growing content. A 20-minute crawl catches problems before they compound into a meaningful drag on rankings.