How To Build A 404 Page That’s Worth It

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It’s been a while since a post about WordPress here at PBF: so here’s Rajeev Edmonds from mintblogger.com, explaining how to create a 404 page that kicks butt

More than occasionally, a reader may follow an invalid URL pointing to a page on your blog and may end up landing on a page displaying a blunt, non-sassy “404 - Page Not Found” message, only to press the browser’s back button. The question is, how do you avoid the visitor from pressing that back button? You cannot stop him or her from landing on a 404 page, can you? Time for damage control.

Almost every WordPress theme comes bundled with a 404.php file. Usually, it shows the ‘Page Not Found’ message, and that’s it. What you want is to renovate that empty 404 page, to help your lost visitor find his or her way around. In other words, your 404 page must act like a compass, guiding the lost soul…

The best strategy is to showcase the best content of your blog. You can categorize it by category or month. The code is real simple, and easy to implement. Just add these lines to your 404.php file:

The first piece of code prints out a list of all the categories on your blog. The second piece lists out
your blog’s archives, categorized by month. If you want to, you can substitute months with =postbypost, to show all the posts ever)

The following is a basic layout of a customized 404 page, that consists of several sections serving useful information to the visitor:

You can make changes in these sections according to your preferences. Integrating Google Custom Search gives an added option to the reader to search for what he is looking for.

If you are not good at PHP or CSS, but still want to make a highly customized 404 page, let this excellent 404 plugin do it for you. It gives you the flexibility to edit and customize the 404 page with ease. There you go. Something for the non-technical people!

Context Sensitive Dynamic 404 Pages

Here is one more approach to design a killer, useful 404 page. Suppose a visitor lands on your blog through, let’s say, http://www.yourdomain.com/ajax-tools, and interestingly your 404 page pulls the keyword from the URL and serves the relevant content dynamically from the database: interesting!

Douglas Karr has done exactly the same and has explained this technique. His experience tells that after implementing this solution almost 83% of his visitors were retained.

One mistake that we often commit is to write 404 on this page of ours. You should avoid it and must personalize the page as if it’s a normal page filled with juicy content. Another good option to make the page more lively is to add some relevant video and illustrations. Adding your contact information at the end of page or a link to your contact page also gives an extra option to retain the visitor, and a contact point.

Darren Rowse has designed an excellent 404 page on his blog, showcasing the best content, a section for newbies and of course, the Google Custom Search box.

Have you customized your 404 page ? If yes, what other methods you use to make it more attractive for the lost visitor?

First image credit: http://flickr.com/photos/filicudi/

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