What do visitors see when they click on a link to your site and the page they were looking for is missing, or the URL has changed? The 404 page is easy to customize, but it’s something that is often overlooked in the quest to make a site “stickier”. You have about half a second to engage the visitor who has ended up at your 404 page. How are you going to do it? I think a little humor goes a long way, and certainly an apology for the inconvenience. Douglas Karr has a nice solution using the Related Posts plugin that pulls the words in the URL that was entered in error, and brings back related entries on your site that might be of interest. Even if you don’t use that solution, it’s a good idea to point the person towards some other content on your site. Since I have the most popular posts near the top of my sidebar, I point them to those and the categories in hopes they’ll not hit the Back button.
Some good reads on 404 page customization:
Site Point has an in-depth article on error handling that is very thorough, as does the Venture Skills Blog.
Smashing Magazine just posted an article that contains some good examples, including the hilarious one at Kottke.
One of the best 404 pages I’ve seen recently is at Theme Playground. They provide lots of options, in particular the search box right at the top is a great idea.
Do you have a good way of handling 404 pages? Share it with us in the comment box.
Hi Randa,
I had a custom 404 page before my new site design a few days back. Now however, and even though my 404 page is located in my new theme files, it isn’t picked up and people get a standard ‘Not found’ message instead.
Not sure how to get this sorted, but I can appreciate its importance. Any help you (or your readers) can offer is very much appreciated!
Thanks for the mention! I do want to continue ‘tweaking’ mine… just haven’t had the time. Looking forward to any feedback any of your readers have. Thanks!
My 404 page allows the reader to search or browse through the archives and most popular posts.
http://iamww.com/404
Showing top posts – what a great idea! Can’t believe that never occurred to me before. Here I was thinking I was clever for including links to my sitemap, contact form and a secondary search form…
Great tip Randa.
Gee, you learn something everyday – I had no idea this was even an option! Thanks for sharing the info, Cheers!
I thought the Google 404 was pretty darn funny actually ~
They usually come up with some pretty interesting ways to handle stuff like that.
Maybe the KISS rule made it’s way through on that one LOL
This is a great article.
I took your advice and redesigned my 404 page from the default “page not found” message. I used a combination of humour, apology and options to go elsewhere, that will hopefully get the visitors to stick with my site for another few clicks at least.
http://www.the-fork-of-ambiguity.com/blah
Thanks for the mention on the 404 page. I’m glad you like it!
404 pages are often underestimated, so the more headway we can make in showing they are important, the better. Hopefully it gets people thinking about other areas of usability…
Nice,
my 404 looks like this http://ddrportal.pocitac.com/invoke_404 (I like that anime 404 character).
The popular posts one is great! I’m on my way to do it now.
Great post, I find that 404 pages often get overlooked. Personally, whenever I take a page down I try to remember to redirect it to the most relevant page to help visitors from old links, helps with the search engines too. But for any broken links and users that may enter an incorrect URL I really like the related posts feature.
I’ve been wondering if my 404 page is too spartan. It does offer a Google search function for the site along with links to the sitemap and our contact page. Maybe it needs more?
http://www.2dolphins.com/notfound.html
I think yours is great Rob. Not too spartan at all.
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