How to Create a Custom 404 Page

POSTED BY socialdude on Oct 12 under rankings

If you’ve spent any time on the internet, chances are you’ve seen silly, funny, or just plain insane custom 404 error pages. However, this article isn’t about creating one of those types of custom 404 pages; this is about creating a better 404 page that is not only helpful to your users but solves technical problems you might not even know you had.

Make Your 404 Page Informative.

Technically a 404 is an “invisible” code that is sent by your webserver to the computer or search engine that requests your page. It tells them the page they were looking for isn’t there. There are lots of reasons why that could happen, such as maybe you moved the page or maybe the person made a mistake linking We’ll deal with those issues later on, but for now let’s focus on the user. Some people will know what a “404 error” is but others won’t, so my recommendation is to tell them it’s a 404 error but also include some information that tells them what happened and that the page they were trying to get to isn’t there.

That’s where a lot sites stop. In my opinion they drop the ball. If you leave a customer at a dead end, they will leave; if you give them an information scent to put them back on track, you have a better chance of keeping them on your website and doing what you want them to do. Every website is different but here are some suggestions of what kind of links/information to put on your 404 page:

Links to popular pages
Links to popular products
Links to important company, customer service, or contact information
Links to important FAQ’s
Links for technical support or contact

Getting Data from Your 404 Page

Now that you’ve made your 404 page useful for the users, how about making it useful for you and your IT team. One of the easiest ways to do this is to gather information every time the 404 page is visited and write it to log or database. If your website is in bad shape and has a lot of errors, this could actually backfire and become a huge resource hog, so be careful when you implement this solution. If possible, try to capture what page/file they were looking for, where they came from (referrer), IP address, and user agent. Once you have had this in place for a while, you want to start aggregating the data and looking for trends or patterns.

Are there files/page that are being requested often?
Are there websites that might have a bad link to you that you can ask them to fix?
Are you getting lots of 404′s from one IP? (this usually indicates scraping or bot behavior)

Making Your 404 Page Work Smarter

Any website that has been around for a few years has likely seen some architecture changes, had pages come and go, and maybe even changed serving technology from HTML to JSP to ASP to PHP. The more changes, the more likely you are to have 404 errors. You can play with your server technology to have JSP pages really run as PHP, but that can get tricky. You can use server tools like ISAPI or HTACCESS to handle these redirections but, if there are hundreds of them, there will likely be a negative performance impact.

A better solution is to use the 404 page to handle redirections. When the 404 page gets called, before a single line of code is served back, check the file requested in a redirect table. If there is a match, then issue a 301 redirect; if not, then serve the normal 404 page. It’s really important to not serve code back and then try to redirect: that creates what’s called a “soft 404″ and actually makes things worse. There are a few advantages to using your 404 page to handle redirects:

You can prevent chaining multiple 301 redirects together
Usually this method uses less resources than ISAPI or HTACCESS
You have one central point of maintenance
It’s a lot easier to migrate this solution if you change hosting companies or serving technologies

So what are the takeaways from this post:

Funny or entertaining 404 pages are good, but 404 pages that help the end user are better
Use your 404 to to give customers the information they need to get back on track to complete a sale, fill out a form, or other mission critical goals
Be helpful with customer service, FAQ, technical, or support information
Use your 404 page to gather information about problems on your website
Use this information to fix broken links and set up redirects

photo credit: Shutterstock/3445128471

How to Create an Amazing About Us Page About Us pages are one of the essential elements of...
Thesis Tutorial – Custom Post Dates The following post is part of my Thesis tutorial series....
WordPress SEO: How to Create Living URL’s If you watched any of the congressional hearings about the...
Optimizing WordPress Page Titles, Post Titles and Page Slugs While wordpress is one of my favorite CMS platforms, out...
Create Landing Pages for Expired Information I’ve discussed what to do when you have products that...

Advertisers:

Text Link Ads - New customers can get $100 in free text links.
BOTW.org - Get a premier listing in the internet's oldest directory.
Ezilon.com Regional Directory - Check to see if your website is listed!
Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
Link Building- Backlink Build offers customized link building services
Directory Journal - Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
LinkWheel SEO - Get Web 2.0 Backlinks
RevSEO High PR BackLinks- Private High PageRank Homepage Link Network
The #1 ranking SEO software toolkit: get your free download
TigerTech - Great Web Hosting service at a great price.
Article-Writing-services.org - Article Writing Services creates quality content for websites and blogs at no cost to site owners.
Rouper.com - Buy & Sell Premium Websites
Blurbpoint - is reputable SEO link building service provider. Get quality one way links with our complete link building packages.