Links on your site that lead to "Page not found": the fix

A local auto shop rebuilt its website. The new pages looked great, but the menu, the footer and a couple of buttons still pointed at the old page addresses. A customer who tapped Financing or Coupons got a bare "Page not found" and, most of the time, left. The owner never saw it: they always came in through the home page, and the pages they checked by hand were the new ones. Here is what each link did before and after, and the fix.

Check yours in ten seconds: open your site on your phone, open the menu, and tap every item, then scroll to the footer and tap those too. Any "not found", "404" or blank page is one of these.

Link, and where it sat	Before	After
Financing (main menu)	/auto-loans/ - "Page not found"; the page had been renamed /financing/	menu points at /financing/; the old address forwards there too
Coupons (footer, every page)	/specials.html - "404"; the coupons page was never rebuilt	coupons rebuilt as a short page; the old address forwards to it
Book a service (home page button)	an old booking widget address that no longer exists	the shop's current booking page
Google and old ads	Before, the Google listing and a year of old posts still sent people to the old addresses, so even a fixed menu would not have caught them. After, every old address forwards to the page that replaced it, and anything with no replacement lands on a helpful "not found" page with the phone number and the menu.

What was wrong

A redesign gives pages new addresses. The pages were moved, but the links pointing at them, and the outside world's links to the old addresses, were not. Nothing was "down", so no alarm went off: each visitor just met a dead end on their own.

Before:
  /auto-loans/      404   (page now lives at /financing/)
  /specials.html    404   (never rebuilt)

After:
  /auto-loans/      301 -> /financing/
  /specials.html    301 -> /coupons/
  anything else     404 page with phone, hours and the menu

How it was fixed

List every dead link. A crawl of the whole site finds each link that answers "not found", and the page it was linked from, so nothing is missed and nothing is guessed.
Decide each one. Point the link at the page that replaced it, bring back a page that should never have gone, or remove the link. Each choice is written down for you before anything changes.
Forward the old addresses (a "301 redirect") to their new pages, so Google, old posts and bookmarks keep working. WordPress, Wix, Squarespace and Shopify all have a redirects screen for this.
Make the "not found" page useful: your phone number, hours and the menu, so the rare visitor who still lands there can carry on.
Crawl again on a phone and a desktop: zero dead links, and each old address ends on the right page.

What it costs

A fixed price, quoted before anything is touched, and you pay only after every link works. No password needed: your website platform lets you add a helper with limited access (WordPress, Wix, Squarespace and Shopify all have this) and you remove me afterwards. If you would rather do it yourself, the steps above are all of it, and I will send you the list of your dead links and where each one should point, for free.

The site in the table is a composite built for this demo, not a real business; the fault and the steps are the ones found on real small-business sites in October 2026. More before/after examples, and who I am: all demos.