Take a look at your anayltics and you’ll almost always see 404 errors being served up. Dig deeper and you’ll find the source of these errors. A 404 Page Not Found error can be caused by all types of various problems. I’ve personally found that most of my online stores 404 errors come from outside sites/sources linking to me. These sites made a simple typo when creating the link.
When you find what’s causing the 404 errors, you can sometimes fix it (contacting the source with the wrong link and asking them to correct it) and other times you can’t. For those times your server delivers a 404 page, why not have your 404 error page be something interesting.
Here’s the standard, boring 404 error page:
It’s extremely easy to set up a custom 404 “page not found” error page so don’t let yours look like the typical default, boring 404 page. Make your 404 error page custom… helpful, funny, and something people will talk about.
The steps below describe how to set up a custom 404 error page if your host gives you access to your .htaccess file on Apache.
How to set up a custom 404 – Page Not Found – error page
Step 1: Create your page. When you create your actual 404 page you want to give the visitor a sense of direction. They arrived at your site looking for something. Give them links to your main categories, some sort of navigation, an explanation on why they’re on the 404 page, an option for getting in contact with you (the site owner) and whatever other helpful information may pertain to your website. Also make your page looks like the rest of your site by using your site template or existing navigation structure, header, footer, etc.
For my online business I personally offer a coupon and reward of sorts. My 404 page has a coupon listed on it… but if the visitor contacts me, letting me know how they arrived at the 404 error page, they receive a much larger discount. While I could have found the source of the 404 myself by looking at the anayltic logs, I prefer to get the information from the visitor. This gives me the opportunity to help them, sell them, get them signed up for my newsletter, get them to “Like” my store on Facebook and generally have social contact with them.
Think of something creative for your 404 error page. Get your customers and visitors talking about it. It’s a simple way to give your site some personality.
Once you’ve created the page, save it with a name such as 404notfound.html
Step 2: Edit your .htaccess page. Add the following line to your .htaccess page:
ErrorDocument 404 /404notfound.html
FTP the updated .htaccess file to your server. If you didn’t previously have this file, simply create it with a text editor naming it .htaccess – don’t forget the preceding period.
Step 3: Test your custom 404 error page. Test out your custom 404 page by going to a page that’s not real for your site…. such as http://www.yoursite.com/notrealpage
That’s it, your done!
Creative 404 error pages
Check out these galleries of custom 404 error pages…
Hi, I'm Steve... an eCommerce merchant that writes about eCommerce, advertising, marketing, blogging, design, social media, seo, tech and other randomness.