404 error page… strategy?

When’s the last time you thought about your site’s 404 error page?

In today’s issue, we’re going to talk about that page and your strategy. Yes, strategy. Because, the 404 is actually pretty important real estate for your site, yet most of us never even think about it and it just comes off as…. an error.

Real quick, though….

My family and I are flying over to the United Kingdom on Saturday. We’re heading into London, will be there a bit, then picking up a car and driving and touring the area west of there. Wish me luck driving on the left. But…

My intention is to be able to send this newsletter out on schedule, from the UK. But, clearly, I don’t have every day planned out and I gotta leave room for the unpredicted.

So, I expect to see you next Monday as usual. But, if the timing is off for the next issue of WP Edge, that’s why. I’ll be in the UK for two weeks, then back in the office here in Florida as usual beginning on the 29th.

OK, let’s get this party started….

Re-Thinking The 404 Error

There are certain pieces of real estate on all of our websites that tend to be more useful than others. And some of them are even under-rated and usually not given a lot of thought.

One of those is the 404 error page.

If you’re not aware, the 404 error is the “page not found” error. It is what happens on your site when somebody tries to go to a URL which doesn’t exist.

What does YOUR site do when there’s a 404 error?

Here’s what mine does, as of now….

Now, I’m not holding my 404 error page up as some kind of example to aspire to. But, at least I DID customize it. I wanted to make it a little more friendly sounding, plus I included the search form to help people perhaps find what they’re looking for.

But, 404 errors happen regularly. In fact, with AI, it might even be happening MORE often than it used to. AI bots are known to “hallucinate” sometimes and send people to URLs that don’t actually exist. Plus, there’s just the matter of broken links, etc.

You may want to use some kind of 404 monitoring on your site so that you can track what incoming URLs are actually generating 404s. A lot of SEO plugins can do this for you. I use SEOPress myself (as do many of my clients), and you can enable 404 monitoring in the Pro settings.

Recently, I was reminded of the 404 page by Katie Keith, of Barn2 Plugins. She posted on X how they re-designed their 404 page. Her two goals:

• Keyword-based redirects when possible. Basically, direct incoming keywords in the URL to specific site resources.
• Turning the 404 page into more of a landing page.

Both of these are super smart things to do.

The keyword-based redirects would take a little bit of coding, but wouldn’t be difficult to pull off. And the re-design just… makes sense.

Think about it… a lot of people who would hit a 404 are not familiar with your brand. They’re on YOUR site nonetheless. Presenting them with a standard error page doesn’t take into account the opportunity that you now have because they are there at all. They might have clicked on a dud link, but it doesn’t mean you have to just show them the hand and tell them to screw off. Why not present your best?

So, while my own 404 page is already customized, I think I’m doing to do it even further. I’m going to turn it into more of a landing page and get rid of that error “feeling” to it. I’m also going to bake in some automatic keyword redirects (using SEOPress) for some of the common stuff coming in (which I am monitoring).

Keep in mind… if you turn on 404 monitoring on your site, you’re going to likely see a lot of garbage. That’s because bots are out there smacking sites with all kinds of bogus stuff. You don’t need to do a graceful redirect for everything. But, it is worth watching so that you can set up redirects for the important stuff. And then show a graceful 404 for the rest of them.

Concierge Client Update

Out Of Office Notice

OK, time for an official “heads up” to all of my clients.

As many of my long-timers know, RV trips is something my family and I have done in the summers for a little while. As the kids have gotten older, that’s become harder. Plus, this year, we decided to do something pretty different.

So, my family and I will be in the United Kingdom from Sep 14th – Sep 26th. We’re flying out this coming Saturday and I’ll be out of the office for 2 weeks.

For my clients, I will be connected while I am in the UK. I will have my laptop, my iPad and my phone. I will be checking and handling email. I will be taking care of small quick things that come up.

What I will not be doing is any project work. Obviously, I’ll be out with my family most of the day and will be sticking to the basics when it comes to business.

So, if you need something specific done on your website, this week would be the week to let me know. I’ve got a few clients with projects on “pause” until feedback is gotten from you… and if you want that project to unpause and finish, this is the week. Otherwise, we’re waiting until October.

Again, if something comes up, you have a question, or any of that…. go ahead and post on Basecamp. You’re still going to hear from me. But, I won’t be as readily available throughout the day.

I may be busy driving a car around England and still trying to adapt to driving on the wrong side of the road. And… those roundabouts.

WordPress News & Updates

Telex Launched. At Wordcamp US, Matt Mullenweg announced the launch of Telex. Basically, this is an AI tool to enable you to build your own blocks for the block editor in WordPress. I’ve seen mixed reviews of it, but that’s normal for tools like this. It is labeled as “Experimental”, so this is a starting point, not a destination. Note that you need a WordPress.com account to try it.

Conversion Bridge Update. Conversion Bridge was updated to 1.9.4. This was mainly a big fix release, but pertinent to my clients using it. I discovered a bug on client sites that their dashboard to Fathom Analytics had disappeared so that they couldn’t see their stats anymore, even though it was still tracking. Until I realized it was indeed a bug, I ended up re-installing the Fathom Analytics plugin itself to restore the dashboard. After reporting this issue directly to Derek (the developer of Conversion Bridge), be had it fixed lickety split and that fix is included in this 1.9.4 update. So, for the few clients now running both, we’ll go ahead and update, remove the Fathom Analytics plugin, just to reduce the duplicate functionality.

Fluent Affiliate Officially Launched. WP Manage Ninja has officially launched Fluent Affiliate. As is customary for all of their launches, it is now in that temporary period where you can lock in lifetime deals. They have options for 1 site, 5, 15, and then 50. All LTDs. Obviously, I now have the 50-site license, so Fluent Affiliate is now available to all clients on the Concierge Core plan or higher.

WooCommerce 10.2 Pre-Release. WooCommerce 10.2 is gearing up for a final release on September 16th. Updates mainly concentrate on some new and faster blocks for building your store. Also some improvements to the Analytics section. Check out the full release notes here.

TutorLMS 3.8. TutorLMS has been upgraded to 3.8 and the main new feature introduced is course gifting. People can now purchase courses for others. Check out the full announcement here.

Reservation System In Woocommerce. In an interesting “here’s what you can do” kind of post, Ian Misner wrote up a post about how they used WooCommerce and the Rental Products for WooCommerce add-on to build a reservation system for an HOA. A cool use case of WooCommerce in the “real world”.

WooCommerce GPT. Speaking of WooCommerce, the Woo team built a custom GPT on ChatGPT that is dedicated to WooCommerce. Ask it questions about Woo…. and it’ll answer. This kind of thing is going to become more common.

ChangeLog Hub. Ryan Logan and Derek Ashauer will be launching the ChangelogWP Project, a centralized hub for changelogs across the WordPress ecosystem. It isn’t ready yet, but you can get onto the wait list (which looks to be powered by FluentCRM ).

SugarCart. Looks like the shopping cart space might be heating up. The FluentCart launch is forthcoming, but it looks like there’s a new one called SugarCart. It is now open for early access. It looks like this one is geared solely for selling digital products, which may keep it interesting because it won’t have to deal with any of the overhead of shipping fees and can just stay mission-focused. Looks potentially interesting, although I’m definitely partial to the “Fluent” team.

WPSubscription. This looks interesting. A WooCommerce add-on for handling subscriptions, but perhaps much easier to use and much more affordable than WooCommerce Subscriptions. The official WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin is stupidly expensive. WPSubscription even has an LTD.

How To Actually Handle Your 404 Errors

Alright, let’s stay on this topic of 404’s and get into the “how to” section of all this….

First, I’m not going to sit here and try to show you how to do this on all tools. Instead, I’m going to concentrate on the tools in the Concierge Toolkit. Keep in mind, there’s also plugins like Smart Custom 404 Error Page that will enable you to use any page of your site as the custom 404 page.

Myself and many of my clients use Kadence Theme. With the Kadence Theme, you will need the Pro version (which I believe all my clients are using) to create a custom 404. Here’s how:

• Go to Kadence Theme settings and ensure that “Hooked Elements” is enabled. If you see an “Elements” menu option under “Appearance”, then it is already done.
• Go to Elements and create a new Element. Set it to be used as a “Template”.
• Using the standard editor, you can design anything you want to serve as your 404 page. All blocks are available to you.
• When done, in the Element Settings section (button in the top right), you will set the placement to “Replace 404 Page Content”. For the Display Settings, set it to “Not Found (404)”.
• Publish the Element.

That’s it. You now have a custom 404 error page in the Kadence Theme.

Now, turn on 404 monitoring on your site. If you’re using SEOPress Pro, then go to the “Pro” section, then the Redirections/404 section. You can then click the checkbox to enable 404 monitoring. I would also enable 404 cleaning to ensure the logs don’t blimp up too much.

From that same screen is the link to the 404 log.

Now, depending on your site, this 404 log can grow really quickly. I just turned 404 monitoring on on my site yesterday mid-day and as of this morning I already have 800 entries in the log.

After you let it collect some data, you begin to analyze the log. Some of the entries will likely be legit links that are just outdated and no longer there. I am seeing incoming traffic to old posts that I deleted awhile back. It is actually weird, too, because I always check traffic logs while doing a content audit and I don’t delete posts that are seeing traffic. So, it is interesting to see these old page slugs showing up in the 404 log. But, that’s why we do these things.

In addition to these potentially valid hits, you’re no doubt going to see garbage. Things like PHP files and other garbage that is clearly just bot traffic.

For the stuff that looks valid, it would make sense to begin setting up redirects to then send that traffic to legitimate pages on your site. For the crap bot traffic, just let the standard 404 page catch it.

Let’s end with this…

I know how easy it is to forget all about these 404s. It isn’t as if this is something we think about all that often. BUT, again, that’s why this is worth doing. In some cases, you can “rescue” traffic to your site that you are otherwise wasting. It also presents a better footprint to search engines and makes the site look more maintained. And, you never know…. those real people who hit your 404 page may end up becoming a subscriber and they just discovered your site. All based on… an error.

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The WP Edge is the official weekly newsletter of the Blog Marketing Academy.