A first-time visitor finds your church online, likes what they see, and clicks "Plan Your Visit." Instead of your welcome page, they get a blank error screen.
They will not email you about it. They will not call. They will quietly assume your church is as hard to reach in person as it was online, and they will move on. Church website broken links cost you the people you most wanted to welcome, and you rarely hear about a single one.
How links break on their own
Nobody sets out to break a link. It happens as a website lives and grows.
A page gets renamed. An old event is deleted after it passes. The giving platform changes its web address. A sermon video is embedded, then taken down on the other end. Every one of those leaves a door on your site that now opens onto nothing. The web has a name for this slow decay: link rot.
The reason it matters more in 2026 is that two kinds of visitors now read your site. There is the person in the pew-to-be, and there is the AI assistant answering "what time is the service near me" on their behalf. A broken link to your service times becomes a wrong answer, or no answer, for both.
Find them before your guests do
You do not need special software to catch most of this. A few steps cover it:
- Check Google Search Console. It flags pages it could not load under its page indexing report, which surfaces most of your broken internal links for free.
- Run a free broken link checker. Tools like these crawl your whole site and hand you a list in a few minutes.
- Click your own key paths. Walk through the links a new guest actually uses: directions, service times, giving, plan a visit, contact. These are the ones that cannot afford to be down.
Fix, redirect, or retire
Once you have the list, each broken link needs one of three things. If the page simply moved, set up a redirect so the old address quietly points to the new one. If it was a typo, fix it. If the page is gone for good, remove the links that still point to it.
This is ordinary upkeep, not a crisis. Fifteen minutes a quarter, plus a pass after any redesign or busy season, keeps the leak closed.
Make your 404 page a doorway, not a dead end
Some visitors will still hit a missing page, from an old bookmark or a link someone shared years ago. That moment does not have to be the end of their visit.
A thoughtful "page not found" page turns a wrong turn into a second chance. Give it a warm, human line instead of cold error text. Add a search box, and a short set of links to the places people are usually trying to reach: your home page, service times, plan a visit, and giving. A visitor who took a wrong turn is still standing at your door. A good 404 page simply shows them the way in.
There is a small hospitality in all of this. We spend real effort making people feel welcome when they walk into the building. Keeping the online front doors working is the same kindness, offered a little earlier.
If you would like us to check your site for broken links and build a 404 page that actually helps, we would be glad to help. Reach us at developwithfaith.com/contact.