Why you need a customised 404 page for your website

Ever found a really interesting looking link only to find that the page no longer exists? Frustrating, right? Google agrees!

A laptop computer is open to a page that says 404 on it.
404 errors are what happens when someone tries to access content that does not exist. Perhaps they mistyped the URL, or maybe the page has been deleted or renamed. Either way, the website returns an error page and the error code given is 404.

With no customisation by the web developers, the user will simply be given a standard 404 page and that will likely be the end of their journey on that website. Not a big deal perhaps but not a great user experience.

Creating customised 404 pages can improve the user experience, help keep people on your site by giving them access to other content, and can even allow you to identify potential new or missing content for your site if you look at what those visitors were trying to find.

For more advice on what to include on a custom 404 page, see Google’s advice: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/custom-404-pages

This blog post was written by:

Alex Kirkup-Lee • February 16, 2022

Let's speed up your success.

Hello and thanks for visiting Digity. The risk of working in the creative industry is that you can easily make every web page about 2 miles long, so we thought we'd save both of us some time and cut to the chase. Tell us what you're looking for and we'll tell you how we can help. If for any reason we can't, we won't waste your time.


We look forward to hearing from you...

Contact Us
Digital Marketing
Social Media Marketing Service
SEO Audit