Finding a website without any error can be quite tricky. Even if we are able to discover errors, there’s no guarantee that we will be able to fix them. A well-maintained website should have minimal or even no error. Web designers should be able to pay attention to any kind of errors, which can be crucial in ensuring proper user experience. 404 Error is among the most common in websites and we should know more about its meaning. This error could happen when someone wants to access a webpage, but it doesn’t exist on our website. This means that the server can’t send the desired page to visitors. If there are non-existent webpages on our website, despite the availability of links; it is important that we need to address this situation. 404 Errors could happen after a web redesign or a complete rebuild.

404 Errors could cause bad effects on our business and we should be able to solve this. Primary landing page isn’t always our homepage and people could arrive from search engines or external links directly to one of our webpages. When people see the 404 Error, then they will assume that our website is down or closed down permanently, even if it is fully working. 404 Errors could also prevent search engine bots to find the right content and this could have drastic effects on our SEO performance. For this reason, we should know how to immediately find the 404 Error. However, this could depend on the cause of errors.

If the problem is caused by the change of URL, then we need to direct the webpage to the new URL, using permanent redirect or a 301. It means when the old URL is accessed by the visitors, they will be redirected to the correct webpage, although it still has an old name. Due to editing and some changes, it is also possible that there are errors on the pages. In this case, we should be able to correct the link. When trying to get rid of 404 errors from our website, we should make sure that it has been completely verified by Google Webmaster Tools. It is able to show all of out 404 errors that they discover.

There are also other tools that can help us to detect 404 errors, such as Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit and Xenu Link Sleuth. There tools are free and can be installed directly. However, 404 errors can still be beyond our control and it happens when people create wrong links on their websites. It means that people are unable visit out website from external websites. This could happen due URL changes on our website or simply because of their mistakes. The best way is to contact these people and inform them about our correct URLs, so 404 errors can be prevented. It is clear that 404 errors can’t be avoided completely and we should have a proper 404 errors. A custom error page should be informative, so people know that our website is working and there’s nothing wrong it. Each time there’s a 404 error, the custom page is shown.