Wordpress Wednesdays: The 404 Notifier
Posted on September 26th, 2007
Ah, the 404. Inevitably, visitors to your website will stumble across a 404 at some point, because of a broken link, a moved page, or a typo of some kind. Given that web users typically have very short attention spans, they’re probably not going to spend too much time finding the article that they hoped to find on your blog if they are presented with a 404 error page. Instead, they’ll just hop onto their favorite search engine to find a working page. Alternatively, they might just give up on looking altogether. In either case, you’ve lost a potential reader and that can’t be good.
In all Wordpress themes, there is a page template wherein you can customize your 404 page. You can help to direct the visitor to what they’re looking for by telling them to use the search box on your blog or to tell them to sift through your archives. While this solution will help to retain some readers, not all of them are going to go through this effort. What’s more, wouldn’t it be better if your reader never saw that 404 error page in the first place? How can you tell what’s sending them astray?
That’s where the 404 Notifier plug-in by Alex King comes into play. It keeps track of all the visits to your site that resulted in a 404 error, telling you exactly where the person thought they were heading. It may be a broken link somewhere in your site that can easily be rectified. This certainly beats going through every post on your blog to find random typos! The report is then sent to you via email to let you know where the 404’s are coming from. Sounds pretty efficient to me.
Thanks Saman Sadeghi for the heads up!
Posted in WordPress | 421 views
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4 Comments
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You’re welcome!
And thanks for the linklove!!
I use Urban Giraffe’s Redirection plugin.
This plugin automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes, and you can manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirections for a WordPress post, or for any other file.
Additionally it captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects.
That actually seems like a more robust plugin! I’ll have to check that out…
For the first point, WordPress 2.3 now automatically does this for you. If you change the slug, then the old slug will 301 to the new slug. If you only type in part of the url (like if the URL has a linebreak in it in an email and you just copy the first part), you’ll get redirected to the actual link. Like if you typed in example.com/2007/09/this-is and the actual URL is example.com/2007/09/this-is-a-test/, you’ll be redirected there.