Increase Your Traffic By Creating a Custom 404 Error Page

September 24th, 2007

Have you ever tried viewing a certain page on a website and instead got the dreaded “404 Not Found” error message? Chances are that you glanced at the URL to check for any typos and then, if none were found, you left the site with a grumble.

Chances are that some of your website’s visitors are doing the same thing. You are losing the visitor and perhaps a potential sale. Also, an unhappy user is not likely to become a repeat visitor.

So why let the life blood of your site (your users, of course) leave unhappy? Instead of presenting them with the standard “The requested page [url] cannot be found…”, give them something helpful.

Benefits of a custom 404 page

1. Capture mistyped URLs – see the common URL typos for your site how you can act upon it, like creating a redirect to the appropriate page.
2. Find outdated links – sometimes it is hard to keep track of which links are no longer in use when your site becomes large. This is an easy way to do that.
3. Increase traffic – keep that visitor on your site instead of losing them to the next search result in Google.
4. Provides you another opportunity to push some offer to the user, like downloading your free ebook if you have one, linking them to an affiliate offer that they may be interested in, or prompting them to subscribe to your RSS feed or newsletter.

What should be on it?

1. State clearly that they have arrived at an invalid page. Display to them what the invalid URL was.
2. Include your site’s main menu with a clear link to your home page.
3. Include a link to your contact page how the user can inform you or ask you about the missing page.
4. If your site has a search function, include it. If not, consider including a Google site search box.

How to make a custom 404 page

1. Create a page called error404.php, or name it anything that you wish. The file name doesn’t matter, but it’s good practice to include “4o4″ in the name.
2. Add this line in your .htaccess file: ErrorDocument 404 /error404.php

If you don’t know how to create a .htaccess file you can learn more about them here.

This is another simple technique to boost the usability of your site that you really have no reason not to do. So go do it!

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