Customize Your 404 Pages

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Many new webmasters miss an opportunity to retain visitors on their site longer by not customizing their 404 pages. The 404 error page is the page that a visitor will get when they search for something on your site that isn’t available. For instance, let’s say you have a site that is all about color TV technology and a user uses your site search to find “b&w converters”. Maybe you have a page for “black & white converters” but you don’t have one for “b&w converters”. The searcher will get a 404 error page telling them that there is no information on your site for “b&w converters”.

This is a great opportunity to lead your site visitor to the correct information. First, redesign your 404 page so that it looks like all the other pages on your site. Then create some text that let’s the user know that you empathize with their problem. Then provide some related links or recommend other places on your site where they might be able to find the information they are looking for. In the case above, you should add a link to the “black & white converters” page and offer that as a suggestion. You’ll retain visitors looking for information on black & white TV converters rather than send them off to find the information elsewhere.