How To Fix 404 Errors On Your Website | Matthew Edgar (2024)

By Matthew Edgar · Last Updated: June 12, 2024

Some people who visit your website will encounter a 404 not-found error page. Maybe that visitor typed in a URL incorrectly or maybe they clicked on a link that took them to a page that no longer exists on your website.

Any 404s that happen on your website can create a bad user experience. You need to fix those errors before they hurt SEO performance or worsen your website’s conversions. There are different ways of fixing errors depending on the nature of the error and the impact the error is having.

When finding and fixing 404 errors on your website, there are many important questions to answer: What is a 404 error? How do 404 not-found errors happen? How do you find 404 not-found errors? How do you fix 404 errors? Why am I getting a 404 error on Google? What tools and data can help you in this process?

Let’s answer these questions in four parts:

• Part 1: How To Fix 404 Errors
• Part 2: How Not-Found Errors Happen
• Part 3: Find All 404 Errors

Part 1: Four Ways To Fix 404 Errors On Your Website

There are four ways you can fix 404 not-found errors on your website.

1. Redirect the 404 error URL to a working page.
   With a redirect, you instruct your website server to route people from the error page to a working page. This prevents people from reaching the error. For example, if people are reaching a 404 error when accessing the URL “/specials”, you can instruct your server to redirect people to the URL of a non-error page, such as “/special-offers” instead. That way, if somebody tries to access “/specials”, they will be routed to “/special-offers” and not see an error message.

   The key part of implementing the redirect, though, is making sure the page you are redirecting to is relevant to the page people were hoping to find. For example, you wouldn’t want to redirect an error URL of “/specials” to “/contact” because that would leave people confused about why they are on a contact page when they were expecting to arrive on the /specials page.

   Learn more about how to use and implement redirects.

2. Correct the broken link leading to the not-found error.
   People and robots find the not-found error from a link that references that error. This is called a broken link. If the broken link sending traffic to the not-found error page exists on your website and is under your control (an internal broken link), you can correct the broken link at the source. For example, if your website contains a link to “/specials”, and that URL returns a not-found error, you can change that link to a working page on your website, such as “/special-offers” instead. Once updated, people will no longer get an error message when clicking that link. You can update broken links leading to not-found errors on any property within your control, including your own website(s), social network profile pages, or local profile pages.

   Many broken links are located on sources you don’t control. For example, another company’s website may contain a broken link to your website. Or, somebody else’s posts on a social network might link to broken links on your website. In those cases, you can reach out to the people who manage those websites or profiles to see if they can update the link. If they can’t fix the broken link, the only option will be to redirect the error URL to a working page.

3. Restore deleted pages.
   Sometimes, you delete pages from your website but people still come to your website looking for those pages you deleted. If somebody tries to access a deleted page, they’ll get a not-found error. Restoring the deleted page would let visitors find the content they were hoping to find instead of the error. Of course, people and bots seeing an error message might be what you intended and there may be a good reason for deleting that page (see fix #4). However, if there is still a lot of demand for removed content, you may want to reconsider the removal and restore the deleted page.
   
4. Ignore the not-found error.
   Odd as it may sound, sometimes the right answer is to do nothing and leave the 404 error in place. It’s perfectly normal for a website to have 404 errors, especially if it’s large and frequently updated. What can hurt SEO and UX performance the most are broken links contained within the website that lead to 404 error pages. Google’s algorithms are designed to favor sites that provide a good user experience, and a website with lots of broken links will not deliver a good user experience. So, while you should remove the links to the not-found error, you can leave the error itself in place.

   As one example, if you’ve deleted low-quality pages from your website, you would want the URLs of those low-quality pages to return a 404 not-found error. Those pages were bringing down your site quality. The 404 error message on these URLs tells Google (and human visitors) that you removed the low-quality content in an effort to improve your website’s overall quality. As another way to signal to Google (and users) that you have removed the low-quality content, any links on your website referencing that content should be removed as well. Removing the links would resolve the biggest SEO and UX problems.

   In other cases, the 404 error is on a page you removed purposefully and there is no other relevant URL to redirect the removed page. This often happens on e-commerce websites when you remove a product from your website and there is no new version of that product. It can also happen if you unpublish blog posts without another, related blog post to redirect to. Whatever the reason, by leaving the 404 not-found error in place, that broken page will fall out of the search index and stop getting traffic (eventually). Here again, you would want to remove any links on your website that linked to those pages you have purposefully removed.

How 404 Errors Happen: Common 404 Not-Found Error Questions

How do I fix 404 errors with a redirect in WordPress?

The easiest way to add redirects in WordPress is with the Redirection plugin (learn how to add a redirect in the Redirection plugin). Along with adding redirects, this plugin also tracks the 404s that visitors have recently hit on your website. For example, here is a screenshot of the 404 error logging on my website. From here, you can hover over the error URL to add a redirect for this error page. I like reviewing the error logging to understand how important it is to fix a particular error. If lots of people are reaching that error, then it is typically more important to add the redirect.

What causes 404 errors on my website?

• Page Deletion. The most common reason you’ll see a 404 error is that visitors or search engine robots are trying to access pages that have been removed from the website. Once a page is removed, it will no longer return content and anybody accessing that page will see an error.
• URL Change. 404 errors can also happen when URLs are changed. If you change the URL on a page, the old URL will return a not-found 404 error. Not-found errors caused by changed URLs are usually easy to fix by adding a redirect from the old URL to the new URL.
• User Error. Not-found 404 errors can also happen because of user error. People copy a URL incorrectly or they type the wrong URL into the browser. For example, you might be hosting a new sale and your ads tell people to visit “site.com/big-sale” but users might type “site.com/bg-sale” instead.
• Broken Links. Broken links are another common cause of 404 errors. When adding links to your website, email, or social share, it is easy to copy the URL incorrectly. I’ve done this myself. For example, I meant to copy a URL like “elementive.com/about-elementive” but copied it as “elementive.com/about-” and then pasted the wrong URL in an email. When somebody clicks on that incorrect URL, your website will return a not-found error page.

How can I prevent 404 errors caused by typos?

Sometimes people need to type a URL directly into their browser. I typically see this with URLs included in offline sales or marketing materials. When people type URLs, they can make mistakes and those mistakes can cause errors. You can predict some of the common mistakes and typos people may make. Then establish redirects taking visitors from the typo version of the URL to the non-typo version. You can track your website’s log files to see which of these redirects are used and then remove any that are not ultimately used.

Should I use a 410 or 404 status code?

Either the 404 or 410 status response code will work for SEO. A 410 status code indicates the page has intentionally been removed. It means “Gone” while a 404 status code means “Not Found”. I recommend using a 410 when you purposefully delete pages from your website. This differentiates intentionally removed pages from other types of not-found errors. For example, if you delete a dozen unhelpful pages, those dozen pages could return a 410 status code instead of a 404 status code. This gives search engines a bit more information about what happened to the page and why you removed it. In my experience with clients, a 410 status code tends to fall out of the index more quickly than a 404 status code.

Should I have a custom 404 page?

A custom 404 page contains a custom error page explaining that an error has occurred. It is designed to match the rest of your website. It includes your company’s branding, your website’s navigation, and includes design elements similar to the rest of your website. There are several reasons it makes sense to have a custom 404 page.

• Better User Experience. Creating a custom 404 error page is a key part of delivering a good broken user experience. By having a custom 404 error page, visitors will know they have arrived on the correct website and have a better chance of recovering from the error.
• Navigation & Search Options: You can include links to important pages, such as your homepage, popular products, or important articles. You can also include a search bar on your 404 error page. These features make it easier for visitors to find what they might be looking for or discover new areas of your site.
• Brand Consistency: Custom 404 pages allow you to maintain brand consistency across your website. This can reinforce your brand identity and messaging, even when the website has broken for the user.

A good example is GitHub’s custom 404 page. It explains something has gone wrong while maintaining their branding. This error page also provides an easy way for people to search for the content they were expecting to find. The navigation is also available along with information to contact GitHub’s support team.

Part 3: How Do You Find All 404 Errors on Your Website?

The first step to fixing 404 errors is finding all of the 404 errors on your website. There are lots of tools we can use to help us find the errors. Before we review the specific tools you can use, though, let’s talk about what expectations we should have from those tools and the specific types of data these tools should provide. Tools should help you:

• Find Errors From All Sources
• Report On Loss From 404 Errors
• Offer Continual Monitoring
• Help Fix 404 Errors
• Provide the Data You Need to Evaluate 404 Errors
• Be Easy to Install

Find Errors From All Sources

People can find a 404 error on your website in lots of different places—they can click on a bad link in a search result or find a broken URL in an old email newsletter. In other cases, people are responding to an offline advertisem*nt but type in your URL incorrectly. Regardless of the error source, the error monitoring tools you use need to help you identify every place your visitors encountered not-found errors. You can’t fix 100% of your website’s 404 errors if your error monitoring tool only is finding 20% of your website’s 404 errors.

Report On Loss From 404 Errors

Any broken link checker or error monitoring tool you use needs to tell you what the 404 error is costing you. When visitors encounter broken pages, they leave your website without engaging or converting. In other words, potential customers are clicking away from your website. Or, if Google is encountering lots of 404 not-found errors when crawling your website, that could be costing you rankings in key search results. You need to know how many visitors and how many conversions you are losing due to 404 errors. This helps you prioritize fixing the 404 errors alongside the thousands of other things you have to do.

Offer Continual Monitoring

The error monitoring tool you use also needs to understand that visits to 404 errors are sporadic. One day, nobody will encounter your website’s not-found error page. The next day, one hundred people might find a broken link taking them to a not-found error on your website. Any tool you use needs to constantly monitor your website and alert you when visits to 404 errors increase so that you can fix the problem immediately. A tool that only checks for broken links on your website once per month isn’t sufficient.

Help Fix 404 Errors

Finding errors is one thing. What you really need though is help fixing 404 errors—and not all error monitoring and link check tools will do that. Ideally, you want to find tools that tell you where the broken links are located on your website or elsewhere on the web. This makes correcting those broken links considerably easier. Other tools might suggest places to redirect the error, which can save you from having to spend time identifying the redirect destinations. In short, the more help the error monitoring tool provides, the faster you can fix the 404 error.

Provide the Data You Need to Evaluate 404 Errors

A lot of the help error monitoring tools can provide is in the form of data. What data should tools tell you about your website’s 404 errors? What data do you need to make informed decisions about your website’s 404 error activity?

1. How Many Visitors Reached A 404 Error? You need to know how many people see a 404 not-found error on your website to help you understand how big a problem 404 errors are for your website and your business.
2. Where Did Visitors Find 404 Errors? Most people find your website’s 404 errors from somewhere other than your website. That might be from another website, an email newsletter, a search result, a social network, or a visit from an outdated bookmark. Regardless of where people found the 404 error, you need to know about it.
3. What Did People Do After Encountering A 404 Error? Did people stay on your website after encountering a 404 not-found error? Or did they leave (as most people do)? If they stayed on your website, what pages did people look at next?

Easy To Install & Configure

Finally, whatever tool you use to check for 404 errors on your site, you want it to be easy to use and easy to install. Time spent configuring a tool is time you could be spending on other tasks. Check if the tool requires you to add tracking code to your website or plugins within your CMS. Some of these tools are very invasive while others have little to no impact on your website’s performance. Other tools don’t require any installation and run purely external to your website.

How do you monitor your website to find every not-found error? Let’s talk about the different types of tools we have available.

• Crawl tools
• Google Search Console
• Web analytics tools
• Web log files
• External link (backlink) tools

Crawl Tools

How Crawl Tools Work

One of the more popular tools for checking broken links that lead people to 404 errors on your website is the broken link crawl (or scan) tool. Crawl tools, like JetOctopus or Screaming Frog, check every link on your website to determine whether the link leads to a 404 error. (Crawl tools, of course, can do a lot more than check for not-found errors.)

These types of tools can be incredibly helpful to quickly evaluate the health of the links within your website. Running a crawl can help you identify which links on your website are broken, which does help you identify the source of the error making it easier to know what to correct. Plus, these tools tend to be easy to install and configure.

Two Problems with Crawl Tools

However, there are two problems with crawl tools.

1. Limited Scope. The biggest problem is that crawl tools only check your website for broken links. What about all the other ways people find not-found errors on your website? That includes broken links contained on social media, email newsletters, offline marketing, and more. Because crawl tools aren’t designed to crawl these sources, crawl tools can miss out on a lot of errors.
2. No Sense of Priority. Crawl tools also typically don’t offer any type of priority regarding your website’s 404 error pages. That is because crawl tools do not look at visitors to those pages. Without visit information, crawl tools cannot tell you about the spikes in 404 error activity that are costing you business. Crawl tools are also unable to tell you how many customers you are losing due to 404 errors.

Recommendations On Crawl Tools

A crawl tool is useful and should be used to evaluate the health of the links and pages on your website. However, the crawl tool should never be relied upon exclusively to help you find and fix the 404 not-found errors your visitors encounter.

Google Search Console

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google and provides detailed information about how Google sees your website. This includes what errors Google sees. Once in Google Search Console, go to the Page Indexing report. You’ll see a graph of Indexed and Not Indexed pages. Below this, there is a table listing the reason pages were not indexed. “Not found (404)” is one reason pages may not be indexed. You can click on this to see if there are any not-found pages listed. If so, click this to see the full list of errors Googlebot has found related to your site.

Google Search Console is a fundamental tool and provides a wealth of data. The error report is certainly no exception. With this report, you can find a wide range of errors that other tools were unable to surface simply because those tools can’t search the web on the same scale as Google.

Drawbacks to Google Search Console’s 404 Report

Of course, Google Search Console’s error report—like all the tools discussed in this post—is far from a complete picture of your website’s errors. For all of Google’s crawling power, they can and do miss broken links that lead to errors. As well, like with external crawl tools, errors can exist in places away from Google’s purview—such as in email newsletters, social media sites, or offline marketing.

If you haven’t already, you need to set up Google Search Console for your website and you need to look at the reports in Google Search Console regularly. This includes looking at and using the Coverage report. But, again, don’t use this tool in isolation. Instead, use Google Search Console alongside the other tools discussed for the best results.

Web Analytics Tools

Track Not-Found Errors in GA4

Measuring visits to 404 pages in web analytics tools can give you an accurate picture of the impact errors have on your website’s performance. For example, you can segment your analytics reports by people who encountered a 404 error and see what those people did differently than people who didn’t encounter an error. Did people who encounter 404 errors on your website convert less frequently? If so, that increases the priority of fixing the error.

The easiest method to do this in GA4 is by using page titles. There are two requirements to do this. First, the not-found error page on your website has a unique page title in the <title> field. For example, the title tag on the error page might be “Page Not Found” or “404 Error”. Second, the GA4 tracking code should be added to the not-found error page.

Once those requirements are met, you can query page reports in GA4 to look at pages matching that title. Go to Reports, select Engagement, and then select “Pages and screens”. Once on the “Pages and screens” report, change the primary dimension to “Page title and screen class”. Then click the plus sign to add a secondary dimension of “Page path and screen class.” Finally, search the table for the title of your 404 error page.

Two Problems with Analytics Tools

There are two pieces of information no analytics tool can provide.

1. No Preventative Error Checks. Analytics tools can only tell you what happened—past tense—on your website. You may have 200 broken links that could lead people to a 404 error but if nobody clicks on those broken links, then your analytics tool wouldn’t tell you about them. As a result, only relying on this method puts you in a situation where you can’t prevent an error from occurring.
2. No Help Fixing 404 Errors. Analytics tools don’t provide any help fixing the 404 error. For instance, based on the nature of the 404 error, should you redirect the URL to a working page on your website? Or, can you fix the broken link that is leading people to this error? Relying on this limited information, you will need more time to dig into the error in order to fix the 404 errors on your website.

Recommendation On Analytics Tools

An analytics tool should be configured to help check for errors. The extra data can provide a clearer sense of priority and a clearer sense of what 404 errors cost you. Of course, you want to find errors before they are a problem, so this method should be used in conjunction with a crawl tool. As well, using analytics tools to track errors will require some configuration.

Web Log Analysis

Finding 404 Errors In Your Web Log

Provided you have some means of accessing and reading your website’s log file, your log file can provide a wealth of information about the inner workings of your website.

Among a lot of other data, log files can provide a list of which URLs returned a 404 error. Like with analytics tools, you can use logs to get data about how people found the error, including 404 errors that come from different sources.

Another advantage is that log files look at every user that visited your website, including automated programs (like robots from search engines). In contrast, analytics tools actively remove bot traffic—for many of the questions analytics reports answer, this makes sense. But, with 404 errors, you want to know how humans and robots are impacted so that you understand the cost to customers and the cost to search engine activity.

Two Problems With Web Log Analysis

1. No Soft 404s. If your website returns soft 404 errors, web log files will not work. If your website returns soft 404s, broken pages on your site will look like every other page on your website in your web log (because they will all return a status 200). As a result, you would be unable to find every 404 error on your website.
2. No Help Fixing 404s. Web log files are, at best, only going to give you a list of the 404 errors robots and humans encountered on your website. Web log files will not help you fix those 404s. Plus, getting the data you need out of your website’s log file to help you fix the 404 errors can be challenging (and your web log may not even have the data you need). As a result, it will take longer to fix your website’s 404 errors. The longer it takes to fix, the more business you will lose due to 404 errors.

Recommendations On Web Log Analysis

Website log files can be incredibly useful to understand how your server is handling your visitors if you have a tool to help you parse the log file. As a result, this tends to only make sense for larger websites where the impact of errors will be worth the greater amount of work to find and fix those errors.

External Link (or Backlink) Tools

How Do You Find 404 Errors in Backlink Tools?

One way to find 404 errors on your website is to see if any other websites are linking to broken pages on your site. When other websites link to you, that link is referred to as an external link (as in, external to your website) or a backlink (as in, a link linking back to your website). Often, external links leading to a 404 error page are called broken backlinks.

For example, tools like Moz’s Link Explorer or SEMRush’s Backlink Analytics can help you identify what websites are linking to your website. You can then use that data to find which external websites are linking to pages that return 404 errors on your website. (To be clear, backlink tools can help you find a lot more than broken links too.)

Helpful for SEO

Looking for broken links that lead to 404 errors on your site can be especially helpful for SEO because links from external websites help improve your rankings within search results. Search engines use links from external websites as one means of understanding your website. If several high-quality, relevant websites link to your website, then your website has a better chance of ranking higher in search results. However, if that external link leads to a page that returns a 404 error, search engine robots will ignore that link and not use it to help improve your rankings. But by fixing that error you can reclaim that backlink and reclaim any benefit the backlink provided.

Broken Backlinks Helpful, But Still Not A Complete Picture

Because these tools do more than look within your website for broken links, external link tools offer more information than link crawlers discussed above. By conducting a backlink analysis, you will find more 404 errors than you would when using a crawl tool and find the 404 errors that can negatively impact your website’s SEO performance.

However, external link tools will never provide a complete picture of the 404 errors visitors encounter. There are still lots of other ways people can find 404 errors on your website that are missed by external link tools. For instance, people can find broken links leading to 404s on your website on social networks, in email newsletters, from old bookmarks, and more. Links leading to 404 error pages would not (and could not) be found in a backlink tool. Backlink tools however are an important tool to use alongside the other sources discussed in this article.

One final pro-tip for external broken links is that you can find external broken links for your competitor’s website too. This can provide you with new opportunities to acquire links to your website.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools provides a list of 404 errors found as well. In the sidebar, expand “SEO” and then click “SEO Reports”. On this table, if Bing found any 404 errors, they will be listed under the “Http 400-499 errors” error type. You can click on this error to see which pages are returning the error. As with Google Search Console, the data is limited but this is another way to get insight into what errors may exist on your website.

Conclusion

Running a website for your business requires a lot of work. You must invest a lot of time, money, and effort to get people to notice, visit, and use your website. The last thing you want is to lose visitors as a result of 404 errors. By finding and fixing every 404 error that is costing you business, you can prevent a drop in rankings or conversions. Checking for 404 errors on your website requires using a multitude of tools to find every 404 on your website and to fully understand what those errors are costing your business. As well, you need to regularly use different tools to monitor for 404 errors since 404s can resurface in sporadic intervals.

If you need help, please contact me today, and let’s talk about what errors (404 or otherwise) are holding back your website and SEO performance.