Oops 404 Error Page

I bet you have experienced this, when a page pops up and the message states that the page does not exist? Most likely this occurs due to several reasons, the page has been deleted by the webmaster, moved, renamed, may have a typo in the filename, may be you typed the incorrect file name, or just has not been linked correctly.

 

A 404 page indicate that webpage is not found or does not exist. To overcome this message its best to create a custom 404 web page. A custom 404 page will help visitors to find the information they're looking for and not deter them into leaving the site.

Tips for creating an effective 404 Error page:
Give clear information to visitors that the page they're looking for cannot be found. Use language that is friendly and inviting.

• Create the 404 page similar to the current theme your website has.
• Include all links that you would have on your live pages.
• Consider adding links to your most popular articles or posts, as well as a link to your site's home page.
• Think about providing a way for users to report a broken link.
• Avoid custom 404 page being index by search engines and Google search results, make sure that your web server returns an actual 404 HTTP status code when a missing page is requested.

How to create a 404 Page

Give clear information to visitors that the page they're looking for cannot be found.  You’ll need to create a HTML page, also try to keep your page above 512 bytes earlier IE browsers don’t handle small 404 pages well, so inserting an image should do the trick. Also, it is probably a good idea to put a robots Meta tag telling search engines not to crawl and index your 404 page.

Example:  <meta name="robots" CONTENT="noindex, nofollow">

Put the 404 Page on Your Site

After you have your HTML page created, upload this on to the server and place it in the root folder.

Setting Up the Server for Your 404 page

You’ll need to know what kind of server you are on if you don’t plan on using the control panel.

Apache Server: If you are on an Apache server you can create a file by the name of .htaccess

Within this file you just have to put the line: ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
Replace 404.html with the path to your 404 page. This will tell the server where to look if it encounters the error 404 (page not found).

IIS Server: If you have an IIS server (windows) you’ll have to open your internet service manager, select the properties of your web server, subsequently head to the custom errors tab. You’ll find all of the error codes here just select 404 and replace the page with the one that you created.

Having created the 404 page, test it by typing in a bogus address.

 

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