How Often Should You Check for Broken Links?

Nobody has a scientifically correct “every 11 days.” Rot follows your rate of change, not a blog’s editorial calendar.

Always, event-based

• After a redesign or theme swap.
• After a domain or HTTPS migration.
• After a catalog import or “we deleted 400 SKUs.”
• After someone “cleaned permalinks.”

Those events create more 404s than a quiet month of blogging. Scan then, not “sometime in Q3.”

Recurring, by site type

• Brochure / rarely edited — a whole-site pass when you remember, plus a page scan when you publish.
• Content site — page scan on publish; site crawl monthly if you add posts weekly.
• Commerce — page scan on PDP templates often; crawl after merchandising storms.
• News / huge archives — crawl is a job, not a hobby. Still scan the templates that ship 90% of traffic.

Outbound citations rot even if you did nothing. That is link rot, not a CMS bug. A quarterly pass on cornerstone articles is enough for most teams.

What not to do

• Daily full crawls that hammer staging and teach you to ignore the report.
• Counting 404s like a KPI without fixing the nav.
• Waiting for Search Console to notice a deploy you shipped this morning.

A sane default

Publish → scan the page.
Release → scan the templates you touched.
Once a month (or after a mess) → crawl the domain, export CSV, file tickets.

The extension is free to use today, so the bottleneck is attention, not a license. Use that fact. Do not invent a ritual that produces unread CSV files.