Today I have been reviewing some old content that I wrote for South Downs Tech. It all started when I checked the site stats available in JetPack (that’s a WordPress plugin in case you were wondering) and noticed some outbound links that I knew were broken.
Broken links are bad. I mean really bad. Links are one of the fundamental building blocks of the World Wide Web. They’re the glue that holds everything together. So naturally I decided I had better go and fix those broken links.
Going down the rabbit hole
While fixing those links I noticed something else was wrong. The old posts that I was looking at had broken images. The reason that had happened was down to a business name change some time ago and a server move to a new domain name around the same time. Everything should have transferred nicely, but for whatever reason it hadn’t and as they were old posts back then, they got missed
Given the posts I am talking about are still appearing in search results and generating traffic for the site, I was concerned that they weren’t presenting a good user experience to my site’s visitors.
So I spent a fair amount of time tracking down the original images and fixing the posts.
Unfortunately I am going to have to recreate some of the missing images from scratch, as I was unable to find the originals. It’s a shame, but it has to be done.
What are the lessons to be learned from this?
- Check your analytics and site statistics regularly.
- Check the posts that are being visited and make sure nothing is broken.
- Don’t leave it until it’s too late!
In other words, pay attention to your website to make sure it looks great and that everything runs smoothly for your visitors.