It’s the time of year when you are probably busy buying Christmas presents for friends and family — and you can trust that many of your target customers will be doing likewise for their own loved ones. However, these shoppers could sometimes find themselves at a dead end.
No, not just in a figurative sense. These people could have decided to check out your company’s offerings but found themselves lumbered with a dreaded ‘404 error’ page. It is in your interest to make sure that, if this does happen, the website visitor isn’t left stranded for too long.
The ever-persistent threat of the ‘404 error’ page
Basically, a visitor to your website will land on a 404 page as a result of reaching your website but not one of its proper webpages. In this scenario, the user could have attempted to type the URL of one of the site’s webpages but mistyped something following the main domain part.
For example, though we have dedicated one page of our website to our Gold web design package, if you were to blunder in the typing of this URL, such as by omitting the ‘g’ from ‘gold’, you would end up on an error page of the Webahead Internet website.
Someone could also stumble upon a 404 page as a result of clicking a broken link. This possibility would be a strong incentive for you to check the accuracy of your site’s internal links.
However, since a meaningful proportion of visitors to your site could still sometimes come across its 404 page, it would be wise for you to customise that page so that readers of it can quickly learn how to get on the right track with perusing your website.
What could you include on a 404 page this Christmas?
Shopping for Yuletide presents can be a stressful experience for many of us. For this reason, you could benefit from injecting a degree of humour into the content of your 404 page.
The 404 page could also include links to specific sections of your website that tend to be popular during the festive period. Of course, relevancy — rather than simply popularity — can also be a deciding factor when it comes to what webpages your site’s 404 section highlights.
For example, if your site has a blog to which you have posted a series of Christmas-related articles, you could link to these on the 404 page. You could then rid the page of all its festive references once the Christmas period has actually passed.
How could you customise your website’s 404 page?
Our team can implement a Content Management System (CMS) for you to use in editing your website. This CMS will be underpinned by the open-source WordPress platform — and, in the WordPress dashboard, a 404 page template could already be readily available for you to use.
Alternatively, you could design a custom 404 page through the use of a WordPress plugin — like 404page or Colorlib 404 Customiser — that would put this kind of functionality at your fingertips.
