404 pages are an essential part of the functionality of a website. They are often ignored, because they are, in essence, a page that should never be seen. In theory, every moved page or folder on your website, every deleted post on your blog, or every discontinued product on your e-commerce store should be handled, and the reader or customer redirected to the appropriate replacement page.. right?

Easier Said Than Done!

That is of course much easier said than done. When you’re e-commerce store has thousands of products, you’re blog has hundreds of posts or your website has dozens of redundant pages, its going to be incredibly hard to manage all of them.

We’ve mentioned above that in theory you should be handling all of your 404 errors. The reason for this is straightforward – it is a waste of time, bandwidth and server resources not to handle them. It is another reason for the reader to leave your site, and another reason for your customer to go to your competitor. But handling all of them can take time, so we need to apply some common sense to how we go about it. Firstly, check the following:

1. Are the 404 errors on your website handled at all? Try entering a non existent page name and see what happens
2. Are the 404 errors returned different? Does a non-existant folder return a different error to a non-existent page name
3. Do some pages return different errors to others? In the case of asp.net, entering a non-existent page with an html extension (default.html) can invoke a different page to entering a non-existant page with a aspx extension (default.aspx) for example

If you aren’t happy with any of the above, you need to address these problems first. We will look at how, in The Importance of 404 Pages – Part 2 – Dealing with Them.