Web Redesign and Broken Links

We’ve getting to the stage of the web redesign where it’s time to think about content. And our website has a lot of content. Even though our website is  smaller than it’s ever been, it still has more than 3000 pages and some 10,805 external links.

While I’m pretty good at clicking links, I can’t possibly click all of those. Instead, the website has a service which checks some links every fifteen minutes. Right now, every external links on the site gets checked every 3 days. Here’s a terrifying statistic: about 1 in 4 external links on our site needs to be updated somehow.

The vast majority of those are 301 errors. The page isn’t really broken, it’s just moved. Much of that is due to Chrome’s move to mark HTTP pages as not secure. But even though those links still work when we click on them, it’s important that we update them. Eventually, server redirections stop working, and if we don’t update the link before then, the link will eventually turn into a 404.

404 links are pages that can’t be found. Those are the next biggest category of broken links on our site. A 404 is the worst. We’ve all encountered them. You think you’ve found a helpful link, but when you click it, you’re left guessing about what was there. And they make us look bad, like we dont’t even have the decency to keep our pages updated.

Here’s another terrifying statistic: out of the 3439 nodes on our site, only 1 in 3 has no problematic links on it.

We need to do better. Lori and I are going to spending a lot of quality time over the next few weeks trying to fix some of these. I’m afraid this is another place where you can expect some nagging emails from us: if a page 404s, we may not have any idea what we should link to instead, and we may be asking you for help.

There’s one particular type of page which tends to have a lot of links with errors: resource pages. There’s a few dozen pages on the site which are little more than collections of links to other sites. While these page are often well meaning – they’re trying to help students find resources we’ve verified as being helpful – they’re sometimes misguided. We’ll dig into those pages deeper in a later post, but for now, when Lori or I find broken links on these pages, we’re just going to remove the link and move on.

Our new goal is to cut the number of links with errors in half before Fall term. Wish us luck!