Comments on: Weekend Projects: 404 Pages

By: Webkinz

Webkinz — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:47:31 +0000

I agree that a redirect can be confusing to some visitors when they don’t realize there was an error. I too believe in showing the error page with destination options.

By: Dr. Cossack

Dr. Cossack — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 03:23:48 +0000

This is a personal preference, but I sure don’t like it when a site redirects me to the front page of a site instead of giving me an actual 404 error page. When a site does a redirect, it’s not obvious that you’ve received an error. More than one, I started reading the page a bit before realizing that I had been redirected against my will.

This is especially annoying when you open a set of pages in extra tabs: once you get around to read them, you might have 3 proper pages and a wrong one. However, since you were redirected, you have no idea which URL you tried to reach: all you see is the URL of the front page. That’s why, on my own site, I use a real 404 page offering a few possible destinations instead of a mere redirect.

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 02:21:10 +0000

I’d say it’s better to do the redirect using PHP rather than HTML.

http://example.com/“); ?>

Since with the meta tag, the whole page has to download first before your browser redirects you… If you do it with PHP, you’ll have to use a .php file, so you’ll need to put this into your .htaccess:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

Or, you could just do the redirect with .htaccess:

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php

In WordPress, if you want to redirect to your homepage, go into your theme’s directory (wp-content/themes/theme-name) and edit (or create if it doesn’t exist) 404.php. Clear out anything in there now, and put in the redirect. Then save and upload.