How to Customize 404 Error Page
If have been surfing the web for a while, then you would likely have come across
a situation where you tried to reach a web page on some domain and got a big
message saying: Error 404 - The page can not be found.
What did you do in such a case? Well if you are like most web surfers, you
hit your browser's back button and walked away. And the website that displayed
the above message lost a visitor and possibly a customer. And it doesn't have to
be that way if webmasters pay a little attention and customize the 404 error
message.
What is Error 404 and Why it Happens?
Web servers are designed to handle a number of error situations that may occur.
Each error situation is given an error number and a default message that the web
server displays when it encounters that particular error situation. Error
situation 404 happens when a surfer's browser requests a web page that the web
server can not find on the domain.
Why Error 404 Happens? There are a few situations that cause error 404. One, the
visitor is typing the page address in the browser and spelling it wrong; happens
more often than one would like to think ;) Two, the webmaster either deleted the
page or renamed it.
To guard against such situations and to avoid losing a visitor, we can customize
the 404 error page so that the visitor gets a much more meaningful message
rather than the crisp default message. While with some web hosting companies,
you will need to modify .htaccess file, with our web hosting you can use the
cPanel control panel to customize the 404 error message. Simply follow the steps
below:
-
Log in to your cPanel control panel at www.YourDomainName.com/cpanel
- Look for the Error Pages icon in the control panel and click on it.
- You will see a control panel error customization tool page with many error
numbers like 400, 401, 404 etc on it.
- Click on the number 404 and you will see Insert Tags page.
- Here you have the option of inserting a number of tags like Referring URL,
Requested URL etc.
- You can insert as many of these tags as you are interested in tracking by
simply clicking on a tag. Note that these tracking tags are all optional;
you don't need to insert any if you don't want to track any such info.
- Underneath the tracking tags, there is a text box where you can type in
your message. You can use HTML tags for your message. Make this message a
meaningful one; this is what your visitor will see whenever a 404 error
situation occurs.
- Once you have written your message, click on the Save button and your
message will be saved. From now on, whenever an error 404 occurs, your
visitors will only see the message that you wrote in the previous step; they
will never see the crisp default 404 error message.
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