How to Capture 404 Traffic

[petey]

Do you realize you might be losing some traffic to 404 errors?

If people are hitting old urls for pages that no longer exist or entering typos in their browsers, they could be arriving at your "404" or "page not found" error page.

You might see this happening in your stats as 404 errors - those are all potential visitors = customers = $$.

In most cases, people will give up and move on.

Here's how to capture some of that lost traffic and send them back to your site.

1. Create a new page in the page editor - call it e.g. "page not found". This is to be used for your 404 page.
2. Edit the page with appropriate wording and whatever call to action you want. Save the page. This page will be used to "generate" your 404 page below.
3. View your site and at the bottom click on the link for the new page you just created - if it doesn't show due to template in use, then you'll need to manually access the page using the instructions in the page editor
4. Verify the page shows ok
5. Login to your cpanel/hosting panel
6. Go to "Error pages" or whatever your cpanel offers for editing Error pages
7. Edit the 404 page
8. Switch back to the window where you're viewing the "page not found" online
9. View source for that page, copy all
10. Paste the source into the 404 error page box
11. Save the error page.
12. Time to test... now go to your browser and try a bad url e.g. www.your68site.com/dfhjsjdhg which should result in a 404
13. A nicely formatted 404 error page will now show.
14. Delete the "page not found" from the admin page editor, as you no longer need it.
15. You're done
16. (Optional - make a coupon and offer it to people on the 404 page as a thankyou and to get them to register and place an ad etc. Limit the coupons with time or quantity as appropriate).

This may not work depending on the hosting account you have. If you can't edit your 404 from the cpanel, just use a text editor and create a file called 404.shtml that you edit and upload to your root (public_html) directory.

There's probably other ways to do this but I thought I'd give this out to you as a way to capture some lost traffic.

Cheers.

-Peter

[Mike-N-Tosh +]

Or, if you're going to edit the 404 error page, why not just add this to the header:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;URL=http://yoursite.com/">
change the red portion to your proper URL, obviously.

That will cause the 404 error page to go to your home page in a couple of seconds. You could even put something in the viewable 404 page like...

Oops! You've entered a page that doesn't exist.

You will be redirected in a moment...

-Mike

[petey]

Yep that's another good option. I'm giving them a coupon though

My point was to capture the 404 traffic and hope this helps people in their marketing.

Cheers.

[juven14 +]

I really like this idea, but seems to me like it would be very open to abuse. People might go and request non-existent pages on purpose vs buying something legitimately. Of course, you could manually approve coupon orders, but if you have massive abuse it would be very painful to single out those who stumbled on a missing page vs abusers.

[Mike-N-Tosh +]

You might also bear in mind that many 404 errors are simply scripts and bots trying to gain access to the site as well. You can check that if you have proper log parser stats.

-Mike

[Eric Barnes]

I like the idea here. Another option which may be better for the future is instead of pasting the code into your control panel instead add something like this to your .htaccess:

ErrorDocument 404 /pages.php?page=9

Then just make the page not appear in the navigation but available.

[petey]

All good points. I'll test the coupon idea so that's why I want a custom page that looks like the site but is not visible.

I'm not too worried about abuse. I have a limited qty of coupons anyway.

If it becomes an issue I'll simply do a redirect as suggested above.

The main point is to do something with your 404 so you recover a % of that traffic