404 – Not Found. Some Tips To Make Your 404 Error Page Work FOR You

Look, it happens. A visitor is going to land on your site trying to get to a page or post that doesn’t exist. The question is this: “Are you going to drive your visitor away to another site, or are you going to try and help them find what they’re looking for?”

Hopefully, you chose the latter – you want to help your visitor find what they want. If you don’t care, then this post isn’t for you

So what can we do to help? The first thing to do is to let your reader know in a nice way that something’s not right. You can use the familiar ’404 – Not Found’ term, with a little bit of an explanation:

404 – Not Found

Oops! The page you’re looking for isn’t here. Maybe we removed it, maybe it was never here. No matter – we can help you find what you wanted. You can…

Then we can show a list of some helpful actions to take:

• Check the list below to see if what you’re looking for might be there
• If you typed the page url address (www.ilikewordpress.com/showme), in the address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly and the case (CAPITAL and small letters) is correct.
• Go to the I Like WordPress home page and look for links to the information you want.
• Use the navigation categories to the right to find the link you are looking for.
• Go back to the page you just came from.
• Use the search box at the top right of the sidebar to search I Like WordPress.

So, from the top:

• In our 404 page coding, we can use some scripting that searches your blog posts for what could be a keyword in the URL (the showme part)
• We can echo the url that the visitor typed in or clicked a link to that landed them here. If we get fancy, we can actually tell whether the visitor clicked a link or typed in the address themselves. Hint – if they clicked a link, we might want to get the link corrected. Be a little careful about echoing the URL, though — if it’s a long one, it could break your layout as most browsers won’t split a link in the middle.
• We can give a link to our home page. Maybe the info they want is easily findable from there.
• We point out the navigation links that are available: categories, archives, latest posts, etc.
• Use a javascript ‘back’ link to take them back one page. You might not want to use this one unless you know that the user clicked a link from within your site. This will only happen if you’ve messed up one of your own internal links. You wouldn’t do that, would you?
• Suggest that the visitor use our handy-dandy search tool to find their information.

Really fancy stuff

I mentioned in the first option that we can use some scripting to search for what might be a keyword in the URL that wasn’t found. What we’ll do in a later post is learn to extract the last part of the URL and use it as a search term. We’ll use a database query that has been bullet-proofed against malicious use.

Also, that javascript ‘back’ link? In a future post, I’ll show you how to find out if a user clicked one of your own internal links or not and how you can serve the back link to just those visitors.

In the meantime, check out a really bad example of a 404 -  Not Found page: what your 404 page should NOT look like.

Update: coincidence or not, Macy’s (above link)  just changed their 404 page I’ll leave the link for posterity, but I’m sure you’ve seen examples of useless 404 pages.

Tagged as: 404, bad 404 page, not found