Your Site Is Probably Missing a Real 404 Page (and It's Costing You Visitors)

Old links never fully die. Someone bookmarks a page, a blog links to an old URL, you rename a service page, and suddenly people land on a blank "Not Found" screen and leave.

A proper 404 page takes ten minutes and keeps those visitors.

What a good 404 page includes

1. A plain sentence saying the page moved or doesn't exist (no jokes that hide the meaning).
2. Links to your top 3–5 pages: home, services, pricing, contact.
3. A search box if your site has more than a handful of pages.
4. Your normal header and footer, so it still looks like your site.

Make sure it really returns 404

A common mistake is a "not found" page that returns HTTP 200. Google then treats it as a real page ("soft 404"). Check it:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://yoursite.com/this-page-does-not-exist

You want to see 404.

Where to set it

• Netlify / Vercel / Cloudflare Pages: add a 404.html at the site root.
• Apache: ErrorDocument 404 /404.html in .htaccess.
• Nginx: error_page 404 /404.html;
• WordPress: most themes ship a 404.php; edit it to add your key links.

Bonus: fix the links that cause 404s

When you rename a page, add a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. Then check Google Search Console's "Not found (404)" report once a month for old URLs that still get traffic.

NEXCOD builds and fixes small business websites. https://nexcod.vercel.app