Don’t lose visitors, create a custom 404 error page
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008Have you ever experienced the dreaded, “404 page not found error” when visiting a website? These errors occur when you’re trying to access a page on a website that does not exist. The most common reasons you may encounter a 404 error on a website are as follows:
An internal link is broken
A common error where the webmaster may have misspelt the link to a page and is unaware.
User error
A visitor to your website may have mistyped the URL of a page on your website or is trying to access an out of date page that they have bookmarked within their browser.
Out of date search engine link
Search engines can still link to pages on a website that have been removed so a user will encounter an error when using these links to visit your website.
Easy solution – Don’t get caught out.
Heart Internet makes it easy for our customers to create a custom 404 error page for their website, giving them peace of mind if an error does occur so they have control over what message is displayed. It doesn’t just stop there either, we also give our customers the option to be notified via email when a user has tried to access a non-existent page, helping them to eliminate the problem.
Tips for creating a custom 404 error page
1. If you want to automatically re-direct users to a page of your choice, add the following line of code below the <head> of your document. This will redirect a user to your homepage after 5 seconds.
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”5;url=http://yourwebsite.com”>
2. Include a friendly statement on your error page explaining what has happened and include a link to your sitemap (if you have one), homepage or contact page.
3. Try to keep the look and feel of your error document the same as your website, there’s nothing worse than being confronted with a white page with “error not found” in a large font.
