Do You 404?

This is a page that probably gets overlooked quite a bit on most sites. We are talking about the 404 error page. You know, when somebody follows a broken link to your blog or you mistype a link to another post on your blog.

Your visitors are directed to what is known as a 404 Error page. Basically meaning that the page that is supposed to be there isn’t! When it comes to your site and people reading it, the last thing that they want is to follow a link expecting to find what they were looking for only to find missing information. As you can imagine, that would be very disappointing to your visitor and if this is their first time visiting your site, it will probably be the last time.

Of course, this is not what we want! We want to keep people on our site, we want to make them happy and provide them with the content that they are looking for. As a quick test, I headed on over to wordpress.org and their themes directory. I downloaded their 5 featured themes and went through the files. While only 1 of the themes turned out to not even include a template for a 404 page, all of the other themes had extremely basic information. In fact, I wouldn’t even call it basic. Sure they stated that there was an error and that the page could not be found, but that is it.

Do you think that that is going to keep somebody on your site? I know that whenever I visit a site and come across a 404 page, my chances of leaving that site and finding another one greatly increase. I don’t want to have to go back a page and look around or trudge through the archives. So what can we do to increase our chances of keeping our visitor? Quite a few things actually!

Apologize for the mistake

It’s your visitor’s first time to your site and they hit an error page, their impression of your site is going to turn negative before you even get a chance to say anything. One of the first things you should do is apologize for the error. Let the visitor know that they have followed a bad link or that your page may have been moved to a different location. Give them a little bit more information rather then just saying “I’m sorry”.

Even though the visitor may have followed a bad link from another site, don’t blame them. The last thing that you want to do is play the blame game. Make your apology sound sincere and provide a brief explanation as to what may have happened. This is your first chance to keep your visitor on your site, so make it good!

On a side note, you can also take a comedic approach with the apology as it may make your visitor feel a little bit more at ease, try to keep the apology on topic with your site.

Provide a search box

I realize that not all sites may have a search box, but if your site does you should definitely include the search form on the page. Don’t tell your visitor to go find your search box, even if you explain to them exactly where it is. They don’t want to go looking for things, they came to your site because they wanted information and making them hunt it down will only provoke them to click away.

Provide a few links to popular pages/articles

Depending upon your technical skills, you may even be able to decipher the link that they followed and provide them with relevant content. If not, providing a list of a few quality pages of your site may get them to click through instead of clicking away. If you are running a blog, you can find a plugin that lists your most popular posts and list that on the page. If you stay on track with your blog and write relevant posts, hopefully your visitor would see a relevant post and decide to check it out.

Give them a chance to contact you

This isn’t going to work 100% of the time, in all reality it probably won’t even work 5% of the time. But there are those people out there who are nice enough to help you out. Providing a contact form, email address or any other way to communicate with you, preferably right away, may entice your visitor to let you know what is going on. Plus, it gives you a chance to fix the error by either correcting the link yourself or contacting the webmaster of the page that the visitor came from.

Should you decide to provide your visitors a contact form, fields for their name, email, website (optional), a place to enter the website that they came from and a message field would be good options. Why all of this? Glad you asked!

You want their name and email address because if they do send you a letter you are going to want to email them back thanking them for their generosity. They didn’t have to take time to fill out your form or to even contact you. Plus, it gives you a second chance to remind them about your website and they may decide to head back and check it out again.

If they left their website, go ahead and check it out. If you like it, let them know in your reply email. You could end up forging a relationship with them leading to anything from friendship to advertising opportunities.

If your visitor is kind enough to send you an email, they probably won’t mind giving you the website that they came from or even the exact URL of the page that contains the link to your site.

The message field is for just that, a message. It gives your visitor a chance to explain the problem and hopefully make it easier for you to fix it.

Depending on your site, you may be able to find even more things to add to your 404 error page. Although I would definitely recommend that the above 4 items be located on your page. Although you are providing your visitor with information, you want to keep it short and to the point. After all, your objective is to get the visitor to the content they wanted or at least to another part of your site. Having a huge 404 error page with so much information could distract them and make them forget why they even visited your site in the first place.

What does your 404 Error page contain?