{"id":10,"date":"2013-08-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-17T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/gmichel\/how-to-fix-a-404-error-page-in-your-website\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T19:13:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T19:13:27","slug":"how-to-fix-a-404-error-page-in-your-website","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/gmichel\/how-to-fix-a-404-error-page-in-your-website\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Fix a 404 Error Page in Your Website"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is a 404 error page? <\/h3>\n

A 404 error page is a page that does not exist on a server. The page may have been moved or removed leaving behind links that lead to a server generated page called a 404 error page<\/b>. Typing an incorrect link in your browser will also lead to a \u201c404 page not found\u201d. Have you ever seen one of these pages while surfing on the Internet?<\/p>\n

404 error page<\/h4>\n

or<\/p>\n

Not only these pages are not pretty, but they are not useful to users. They may think that not only the page, but the website is gone and visit a concurrent website instead. As a webmaster it is important to correct this to improve the user experience and also your SEO.<\/p>\n

How to Fix a 404 Error Page<\/h2>\n

Having a 404 Error Page<\/i> in your website is inevitable. There are some of these errors you can control and some that you can\u2019t control.<\/p>\n

So the first step<\/strong> is to make a custom page that will inform and be useful for users to find what they are looking for on your website. Blogs can generate these pages without any effort on your part.<\/p>\n

Sample 01<\/h4>\n

Sample 02<\/h4>\n

These pages are generated by the blog theme and fulfill their purpose in informing the visitor why they see the page and a way to search what they are looking for. The look is the same as the blog in itself and integrates nicely.<\/p>\n

Some Webmasters get very creative and take this opportunity to work on a specific design or offer different links for users to navigate to.<\/p>\n

Sample 01<\/h4>\n

Sample 02<\/h4>\n

See more example on this excellent blog post<\/a>: 404 Error Pages, One More Time<\/b><\/p>\n

The second step to do<\/strong> is to check on your website if you still have links that point to these 404 error page. If you have these \u201cbroken links\u201d on your site, they can hurt your SEO efforts and they need to be corrected to go to the correct page or removed completely.<\/p>\n

Webmaster Tools can help you to identify those 404 error page and broken links.<\/p>\n

On the example above you can see that there are 3,156 \u201cNot found\u201d errors. When clicking on one of the URL a pop-up opens and shows the incorrect link with the URL of pages linking to it. These broken links will have to be removed.<\/p>\n

The third step will be to recover the traffic of a 404 error page.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If the traffic come from another website with a wrong link and lead to a 404 error page on your site, you can do two things. Ask the webmaster of the other site to correct the link, which can be challenging and take time, or you may just create a page for this wrong link, or use a Permanent 301 redirect pointing to the correct page.<\/p>\n

Prevention is the best strategy. Do not rename pages after they have been published and do not delete them. Redirect them to a similar page or a category page instead and try not to redirect to the home page. This way you won\u2019t lose traffic and risk to get broken links on your site or other Webmasters\u2019 sites who link to you.<\/p>\n

Having a 404 error page<\/u> is not as bad as it sounds when you know how to deal with it.<\/p>\n

Michel Gerard<\/strong><\/p>\n

Get a blog like this one: START BLOGGING NOW\n\n<\/a>This was almost kept a secret: VIEW VIDEO HERE<\/pre>\n

\nPS: <\/b>If you want to know how I earn money blogging on the topics I like and how you can do the same too,<\/em> .<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What is a 404 error page? A 404 error page is a page that does not exist on a server. The page may have been moved or removed leaving behind links that lead to a server generated page called a 404 error page. Typing an incorrect link in your browser will also lead to a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":891,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,20,41],"tags":[42,43],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-internet-marketing","category-seo","tag-404-error-page","tag-404-page-not-found"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/gmichel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/gmichel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/gmichel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/gmichel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/891"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/gmichel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/gmichel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/gmichel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions\/55"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/gmichel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/gmichel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/empowernetwork.com\/gmichel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}