We’ve all at some point come across a 404 Not Found page while we’re browsing. How annoying! Most of the time they don’t say anything other than that, 404 – Page Not Found, and it’s not very useful in helping us figure out what the heck we did wrong.
If you want to make your website that little bit more user friendly you should think about creating a custom 404 page, and here are a few good reasons why:
- it’s more personal to have a custom message instead of the generic one, it makes your users feel like you actually care
- it’s a good way to ask folks to contact you and tell you what went wrong, everyone out there can be helping you keep your website bug-free
- if you make it fun you can help alleviate the annoying feeling that can often comes with being faced with a generic 404 error page
- you can take the opportunity to redirect the user to a variety of other places on your website where they could potentially find other useful information
Long story short, if you can keep your users from getting annoyed and keep them on your website then you will keep them happy and increase the possibility of future interactions (and possibly future sales).
So, how do we go about creating our own custom 404 page in WordPress? You do need to have a bit of coding knowledge in order to do so, but it’s still quite simple.
Log into your WordPress site and go to the file editor – there you’ll see a file called 404 Template and this is the one you want to edit.
Now’s your chance to be creative – decide what you want to say to folks who can’t find something, think about how you could redirect them to a useful area.
Check out some of these examples: http://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/best-of-best-wordpress-404-error-page-designs/
After you’ve added your customizations go test our your error page and that’s it, you’re done.
Voila!