We all hate visiting a URL and finding a 404 error page. You do not want visitors to get a 404 error page. It is annoying and frustrating and visitors leave with a bad impression of your web site. Even worse, they will even think that your whole site no longer exists. This can be avoided by creating a custom 404 page.

A custom 404 page adds professionalism and a thoughtful touch to your site. It shows you care about your visitors and their experience at your site. A well-designed 404 page also helps traffic, since visitors aren't left at a dead end.

To be as helpful as possible, a custom 404 page should include these elements:

An apology needs to be short short and sincere. At this point, visitors are already annoyed. Do not waste their time with a wordy apology. Be sure not to imply that this is their fault. Even if it is, it is not worth it to blame your visitors.

Not everybody knows what a 404 is. Explain what has happened. Be careful not to use words like error or problem. This implies it is the visitor’s fault. Simply state exactly what has happened. On my custom 404 page I included reasons why this page will appear, but excluded the reason “the address could have been typed incorrectly”. Do not use tech speak to explain problems. I don’t even use the term 404.

An important advantage of a custom 404 page is getting visitors back to your site. You do not want to lose visitors. This can be accomplished by adding links back to your site. You can even use the same navigation as the rest of your site. I used text links on my custom 404 page, because I wanted the page to load fast and be as direct as possible. Remember, visitors are probably already annoyed and frustrated. Do anything you can to get them back as quickly as possible. Some webmasters go so far as to include a site map, but I think that is a little overboard.

I include a search box for my site on my custom 404 page, just in case visitors aren't sure which page they are looking for. They can enter their search terms and a list of pages will appear as well as the probability of that page being the page they are looking for.

To date, I have not been contacted about a 404. I don’t really expect to be contacted anytime soon, either. It assumes that visitors will take time to tell you how to fix your site. However, I still include it. I want to know if they had a problem, so I can fix it right away, but for the most part, it is there to show I do care. After all, I want them to have a good experience to my site.

In order to implement a custom 404 message, you'll need to set it up on your server. This will vary from server to server, so contact your hosting company to see how you can do this. I am unaware of any hosting companies that do not allow you to customize error pages.

Please note that Internet Explorer 5 and above will not display custom 404 pages if they're smaller than 512 bytes. I guess Microsoft figures any 404 page smaller than 512 bytes is not worth displaying. If your file falls short of this, you can add comments to your HTML code to beef it up a bit. This should not be an issue if you include all items listed in this article.

Hide custom 404 pages from spiders. To do this, create a robots.txt file in the directory that your domain is mapped to. This is what should be in it:

You can also add this Meta tag to all 404 files:

Look at a custom 404 page as a requirement for a site, not just an added luxury. This will help you retain traffic. After all, that is the goal of every web site. Traffic Retention. It is also a requirement for usability. It is a poor design habit not to give your visitors a way out if they encounter problems. Remember to keep your apology short and explanations clear. Give visitors a way back to your site by including navigation and a search field. Last but not least, give visitors an option to contact you.