Designing good 404 pages

There is one essential thing that you have to understand about people ending up in your 404 page – they want to be on your site. Once you accept that fact, it stops to matter why they got there and you start to treat the 404 page like any other page on your site.

In any page on your site the next goal after showing quality content is to retain the surfer on your site and directing him towards pages which can produce value for you (get a sale, get a lead, sign a petition, etc…). The goal in the 404 page is exactly the same, it is just the lack of context that makes it more difficult then in other pages.

But do you really lack context? no one tries to get to a 404 page for the fun of it, and everybody which ends up there had a URL which he assumed is valid. What we need to do is parse the URL and try to extract as much information from it about where the surfer tried to get to.

How can we extract context from a URL? For example lets look at the recommended URL structure for WordPress sites which use pretty permalinks (virtual directories).

  • A Post URL has the structure of /year/month/day/title. Possible way to handle 404 which have similar structure is
    • If the title is of an existing post in different location display a link to that post
    • If there is a title but no post matches it suggest making a search (or show possible search results) using the wordpress search feature and google search limited to your site
    • If the month is invalid – suggest going to the archive page which lists post from that year
    • If the day is invalid – suggest going to the archive page which lists post from that month
  • An image or other file types URL has the structure of /wp-content/uploads/year/month/file. Possible way to handle 404 which have similar structure is
    • If the file is of an existing file in different location display a link to that file (or the image if it is an image)
    • If file can’t be found at all suggest making a search in the site’s media library (or show possible search results) using the wordpress search feature and google search limited to your site
  •  A category URL has the structure of /category/category name1/optional category name2. Possible way to handle 404 which have similar structure is
    • If category name 2 exists but not under category name 1 then display a link to it
    • If category name 2 don’t exist but category name 1 does, then display all the subcategories of category name 1
    • If niether category name1 nor category name 2 exist display a list of the categories

And so on, you probably got the drift by now. My examples are very generic, but knowing the content in your site you might come up with even better ways to seduce the random 404 visitor to stay in your site.

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