Using Wordpress? Get our lightening fast Wordpress Optimised Hosting.
Get Wordpress HostingHave you ever clicked on a link on a site only to end up with a page like this:
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It's annoying isn't it? Well "404 page not found" is one of the most common errors on the web. They are almost impossible to avoid as a site owner especially if you have lots of posts. HTTP 404 errors are raised when the client, that is the browser, is able to communicate with the server, although it's not able to retrieve the resource or page that was requested by the user. It may also be raised as a result of a broken or dead link. 404 errors will hurt your SEO.
It's therefore vital you manage them and that's the purpose of this tutorial. While search engine bots are crawling your site, you wouldn't want them finding well-formatted URLs that lead to a 'Page Not Found'. Plenty of HTTP 404 errors can therefore hurt your site's credibility and ranking.
Moreover, a busy user visiting your site only to encounter an error would leave and never come back. This then leads to a higher bounce rate, something we try to avoid by investing a lot of hours producing quality content. A user who is able to visit a couple of pages in your site is likely to come back or even bookmark your site.
It therefore makes sense we handle these errors properly. Luckily, we are using Wordpress, a popular Content Management System with thousands of professional plugins. Never mind most of them being free and open source. Yes, I mean free as in free. A search for '404' in the wordpress plugins portal gives a long paged list of plugins. You can use any. However today we shall only pick the first one: 404 to 301 plugin. Why? Because:
It's important we enable the rewrite_module in our server so that our redirects work appropriately. If you are using a local wordpress installation with wamp server it's very easy:
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If you are on a shared host then you may need to contact your host's support to do it for you. Most hosts should probably have it enabled already.We are using the '401 to 301' plugin. Its free. Here's how to install it:
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We now need to configure our plugin:
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The reality is that everybody would like to have a better search engine ranking. It's why we work hard as site owners, designers and developers to optimize our sites. However, sometimes what we really need to do is very simple: provide a great user experience. Hence it's imperative that we properly handle the 404 errors. We don't have to get our hands dirty with code. There are already many plugins that can assist us. As long as the plugin can meet our expectations. Such plugin is '404 to 301' that we used here. The choice is always yours, so you can use any that works for you. But first we need to make sure we have the rewrite_module enabled in our Apache Server. It's easy to do but you must have the permission to tinker with your server's settings. In a shared host, if it's not enabled you may need to contact your host's support. However in a localhost like the WAMP Server we used, it's pretty easy. Our plugin in this tutorial can enable us log errors as well as send email notifications. At the end of the day handling our 404 errors smartly is not difficult and we ensure smooth user experience as well as improving our search engine ranking. Our users end up happy. The search engine ends up happy. And so do we.
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