Ok so s%^$# happens but if it’s a business link you need it fixed fast.
There are a few things you need to have also.
Detection
Great friends/clients who will alert you to broken links in the first place. Within minutes of my email campaign going out I had an email from Mary Morel of www.onlinegrammar.com.au and a phone call from Sally Foley Lewis of www.sallyfoleylewis.com , twitter @SallyFoleylewis alerting me to a broken link. A huge debt of gratitude to you both for watching my back.
Background
So the scenario was I duplicated an email campaign on mailchimp.com my favourite newsletter delivery service and pasted in the new link which looked perfect. But hat had happened was that the actual link which you don’t see when editing had remained the same. So the link in the email went to a page I had removed and hence the dreaded ‘Not Found, Error 404’
Mailchimp lesson: delete old links and start from scratch, do not paste new links over old links.
Quick email marketing bonus tool tip ( I use it on this website)
The Bloom plugin by Elegant themes advertised here is a beautiful way to build you email list with beautiful optin forms, hopefully you will see it when reading this post unless you are on a mobile as I hate mobile popups personally and this plugin lets you choose whether or not to display them.
Solution
Stay calm, you can still contact these clients with the correct link but in the mean time you can divert the dead link to the correct one.
Install a plugin called Simple 301 Redirects there is another more popular one called redirectify but I have found it clashes with certain plugins like shopping carts etc.
So once installed and activated you then find it in the left hand menus under ‘Settings -> 301 Redirects’
How you enter the broken link and the correct link are critical for it to work.
The broken link goes on the left and looks like this:
/broken-link-page
The correct link needs to have the full web address so looks like this:
https://www.thewpguy.com.au/correct-link
And that’s it, fixed in minutes and back on the road.
I would still send a quick note to you email list to be on the safe side also for anyone who clicked early and missed the redirection.
I’ve been building WordPress websites for over a decade, spoken at conferences around the world, and taught countless people how to build and maintain their sites.
I know its a jungle out there finding the right people for website development.
But I’m here to help.
Author Profile – Tony Cosentino
