Why links die, and how to catch it before your visitors do
A dead link costs more than the tap it loses. It tells the one person who found it that nothing here is looked after, and that person will not write to you about it.
The ordinary ways a link dies
Almost none of this is dramatic. Links do not break because something went wrong on your page; they break because the world on the other end moved on, in ways that are perfectly normal for the people who moved it.
- A shop item sells out and the listing is taken down, so the link that sold it now leads to a category page or nothing at all.
- An event finishes. The ticket page stays up for a while, then becomes an archive entry, then becomes a redirect to next year.
- A service reorganises and every address changes. Sometimes the old ones forward for a year, sometimes they stop the same afternoon.
- An account is renamed. On most platforms the old handle is released, and a stranger can take it the following week.
- A shortened link expires with the account that made it, or with the shortening service, and takes everything behind it along.
Five ordinary events, none of which produce a warning. The page keeps rendering, the button keeps looking clickable, and the only difference is on the far side of the tap.
Nobody is going to tell you
A visitor who finds a dead link does not write to you. They assume you know, or they assume the page is abandoned, and either way they leave. This is worse than losing the click, because they also revise their opinion of everything else on the page. If the second link was dead, the fifth one probably is too, so why bother.
A broken link is not a missing click. It is a small, believable piece of evidence that nobody is home.
The shortener you cannot edit
Shorteners look like a solution to long addresses and quietly become a dependency. The trap is not that they break often. It is that when they do, you cannot fix them. A short link on a printed poster, a business card or a video description points wherever the shortening service says it points, and if that service closes, changes hands or locks the account you made it with, you have no way to redirect it.
The safer arrangement is an address you control in front of everything else. Print one address, keep it forever, and change what sits behind it as often as you like. That is most of what a link page is actually for, and it is why a renamed page that keeps redirecting from its old address is worth more than it sounds. A short path on your own subdomain — mia.tapmy.link/shop — is the same idea one level down: the part you print belongs to you, and the destination behind it stays editable, which is precisely what a third-party shortener takes away.
A 404 is the good outcome
When people picture a broken link they picture an error page. That is the harmless version: the visitor sees that something is gone, blames time, and comes back to your page. The expensive version is a link that still works and lands somewhere you would never have chosen.
A lapsed domain becomes a parked page full of adverts. A released handle becomes somebody else’s account. An old event page redirects to whatever the venue is selling this season. None of it looks broken, so nothing draws your attention to it, and a visitor who lands there reasonably assumes you sent them on purpose.
Catching them by hand, then by habit
For a page of ten or fifteen links, checking by hand is the whole answer: open the page on a phone once a month and tap every one, following it far enough to read what actually loaded. Two minutes, no tooling. Nothing on the page is watching those destinations for you — a link page stores an address, it does not test it, and you should distrust anything that claims otherwise without telling you how.
Automation earns its place later, when the list is long, when the links are somebody else’s inventory, or when a dead link costs real money the same day. Until then a recurring reminder does the job, and it has the advantage of making you look at the page as a visitor rather than as its author.