How To Fix 404 Errors On Your Website

Some people who visit your website will encounter a 404 not-found error page. Maybe that visitor mistyped a URL or clicked on a link that took them to a page that no longer exists on your website.

Not Found 404 Errors create a bad user experience that can hurt conversions and negatively affect your website’s SEO performance. It is important to monitor and fix 404 errors as part of your regular website and SEO maintenance.

When finding and fixing 404 errors on your website as part of this regular maintenance, there are many important questions to answer: What is a 404 error? How do 404 not-found errors happen? How do you find 404 not-found errors? How do you fix 404 errors? Why am I getting a 404 error on Google? What tools and data can help you in this process?

How to Fix 404 Errors

There are different ways of fixing errors depending on the nature of the error and the error’s impact on your website’s performance.

1. Redirect the 404 error URL to a working page.
   
   Best For:
   Error URLs that visitors or robots are regularly accessing
   
   How it Works:
   If many visitors and search engine robots reach a 404 error page on your website, the error will likely cause significant performance problems. These high-impact errors need to be fixed with the clearest signal possible: redirecting the error URL to a working page.
   
   With a redirect, you instruct your website server to route anybody accessing the error page to a working page. This prevents people from reaching the error and, instead, people see a working page on your website. This creates a better user experience and also minimizes SEO impact.
   
   Learn more about how to use and implement redirects.
   
   Example:
   If people are reaching a 404 error when accessing the URL “/specials”, you can instruct your server to redirect people to the URL of a non-error page, such as “/special-offers” instead. That way, if somebody tries to access “/specials”, they will be routed to “/special-offers” and not see an error message.
   
   Note:
   The key part of implementing the redirect, though, is making sure the page you are redirecting to is relevant to the page people were hoping to find. For example, you wouldn’t want to redirect an error URL of “/specials” to “/contact” because that would leave people confused about why they are on a contact page when they were expecting to arrive on the /specials page.
   
2. Correct the broken link leading to the not-found error.
   
   Best For:
   Internal links (on your website) that take people to an error page
   
   How it Works:
   People and robots find the not-found error from a link that references that error. This is called a broken link. If the broken link sending traffic to the not-found error page exists on your website and is under your control (an internal broken link), you can correct the broken link at the source.
   
   Example:
   If your website contains a link to “/specials”, and that URL returns a not-found error, you can change that link to a working page on your website, such as “/special-offers” instead. Once updated, people will no longer get an error message when clicking that link. You can update broken links leading to not-found errors on any property within your control, including your website(s), social network profile pages, or local profile pages.
   
   Note:
   Many broken links are located on sources you don’t control. For example, another company’s website may contain a broken link to your website. Or, somebody else’s posts on a social network might link to broken links on your website. In those cases, you can reach out to the people who manage those websites or profiles to see if they can update the link. If they can’t fix the broken link, the only option will be to redirect the error URL to a working page.
   
3. Restore deleted pages.
   
   Best For:
   Pages you removed but visitors still wanted to see
   
   How it Works:
   Sometimes, you delete pages from your website because you think people no longer want to see that content. After deleting the page, you realize people may still visit your website expecting to find those pages. If somebody tries to access a deleted page, they’ll get a not-found error. Restoring the deleted page would let visitors find the content they were hoping to find instead of the error.
   
   Example:
   You deleted several old blog posts from your website because they had very little traffic. After deleting, you realize that one of those blog posts was linked to by a major news publication. Google was using that link as part of understanding your website’s authority. As well, people were clicking through from that news story to your website. Adding that page back to your website will keep people from seeing a not-found error and will help Google use that backlink to evaluate your site’s authority.
   
   Note:
   Before deleting pages, carefully review traffic patterns to those URLs. Also, check backlinks to the pages. If there is still value in the page, consider keeping it on your website (possibly with modifications to the content).
   
4. Ignore the not-found error.
   
   Best For:
   Low-quality, unhelpful, or outdated content you have purposefully removed
   
   How it Works:
   You may have deleted a page from your website because it contains low-quality or unhelpful content. You would want the URLs of those low-quality pages to return a 404 not-found error. Those pages were bringing down your site quality. The 404 error message on these URLs tells Google (and human visitors) that you removed the low-quality content to improve your website’s overall quality.
   
   In these situations, the right answer is to leave the 404 error in place. It’s perfectly normal for a website to have some 404 errors, especially if the website is larger and frequently updated.
   
   In other cases, the 404 error is on a page you removed purposefully and there is no other relevant URL to redirect the removed page. This often happens on e-commerce websites when you remove a product from your website and there is no new version of that product. It can also happen if you unpublish blog posts without a related blog post to redirect to. By leaving the 404 not-found error in place, that broken page will fall out of the search index and stop getting traffic (eventually).
   
   Note:
   If you do leave the 404 error in place, remember to use a custom 404 error page that provides a good experience to help people recover from the error.
   

How to Find 404 Errors

The first step to fixing 404 errors is finding all of the 404 errors on your website. While there are many tools you can use to find the errors, I’ll review three you can use to monitor 404 errors: Google Search Console, GA4 and Screaming Frog.

Pro Tip: I recommend you use multiple sources to identify errors that may exist because each of these methods detects errors in slightly different ways. For example, during a technical SEO audit, I review 404 errors from as many sources as possible to make sure I can find every issue on the website.

Find 404 Errors in Google Search Console

In Google Search Console, go to the Page Indexing report. You’ll see a graph of Indexed and Not Indexed pages. Below the graph, you will see a table listing the reasons pages were not indexed. “Not found (404)” is one of those reasons. If you do not have this line listed in the table, then Google has not found any 404 errors on your website. Most websites will have some 404 errors found. If you do have “Not found (404)” listed, you can click on this line of the table to see a list of not-found error pages Google has detected on your website.

Track Not-Found Errors in GA4

You can track how many visitors reach a 404 error in GA4. This will give you an accurate understanding of how not-found errors impact your website’s performance. For example, are there lots of people reaching an error? Or, did people who encounter 404 errors on your website convert less frequently? If so, that increases the priority of fixing the error.

The easiest method to track this in GA4 is by using page titles. There are two requirements to do this.

1. First, the not-found error page on your website has a unique page title in the <title> field. For example, the title tag on the error page might be “Page Not Found” or “404 Error”.
2. Second, the GA4 tracking code should be added to the not-found error page.

Once those requirements are met, you can query page reports in GA4 to look at pages matching that title. Go to Reports, select Engagement, and then select “Pages and screens”. Once on the “Pages and screens” report, change the primary dimension to “Page title and screen class”. Then click the plus sign to add a secondary dimension of “Page path and screen class.” Finally, search the table for the title of your 404 error page.

Find 404 Errors in Screaming Frog

You can identify 404 errors linked to somewhere on your website using a site crawler, like Screaming Frog.

1. After running a Screaming Frog crawl, go to the “Response Codes” tab.
2. Filter to Client Error (4xx). This will show you all of the 404s found during the crawl. Helpfully, Screaming Frog will also show you errors on external websites you are linking to, in addition to internal links.
3. If you see a 404 error listed, click on it to view more details in the lower panel.
4. In the lower details panel, click the “Inlinks” tab. This will show you where this broken link is contained on the website. Helpfully, it also shows the Anchor Text (or link text) used for this link. That way you can quickly identify the link on the page.

In the screenshot below, I have a broken link on one of my blog posts that links to a PDF that is no longer available on Google’s website. I can see the page with this error in the “From” column and the link’s text in the “Anchor Text” column.

How 404 Errors Happen: Common 404 Not-Found Error Questions

How do I fix 404 errors with a redirect in WordPress?

The easiest way to add redirects in WordPress is with the Redirection plugin (learn how to add a redirect in the Redirection plugin). Along with adding redirects, this plugin also tracks the 404s that visitors have recently hit on your website. For example, here is a screenshot of the 404 error logging on my website.

From here, you can hover over the error URL to add a redirect for this error page. I like reviewing the error logging to understand how important it is to fix a particular error. If lots of people are reaching that error, then it is typically more important to add the redirect.

How do you remove 404 error pages from Google’s index and rankings?

If you have recently removed a page from your website, it will take Google a few days to a few weeks to remove that page from the index and rankings. Google has to recrawl the page, detect the 404 response status, and update its internal records about the page before you see a change in Google Search Console and before you see the page fall out of rankings.

If it has already been a few weeks since removing the page, you want to inspect the error URL in Google Search Console. Inspecting the URL will show you if Google is correctly detecting the 404 status code on the page.

Google may not see the 404 status code because crawling is blocked by your website’s robots.txt file. Check your robots.txt file for any disallow statements that would prevent Google from crawling this URL. If Google can’t crawl a URL, then its robots will not see the 404 error message.

You may also have a Soft 404. A Soft 404 returns an error message without the proper 404 status code. Without the proper status code, Google may not understand this page is in error and would not update indexing or ranking correctly.

Google only keeps pages in the index when its robots find signals that indicate the page is important. Check your website for any internal links referencing the 404 error URL. These internal links could indicate to Google the error page is still important and worth ranking. This can also happen when schema or XML sitemaps continue to reference 404 error URLs.

You can also use Google Search Console’s URL Removal Tool. This tool instructs Google to remove a URL from rankings, at least temporarily. Removal requests will only last for a few months, at most, so this is not a long-term solution. In Google Search Console, go to Removals under the “Index” section and enter the 404 URL in the Temporarily Remove tool to request removal from search results.

Should I use a 410 or 404 status code?

Either the 404 or 410 status response code will work for SEO. A 410 status code indicates the page has intentionally been removed. It means “Gone” while a 404 status code means “Not Found”. I recommend using a 410 when you purposefully delete pages from your website. This differentiates intentionally removed pages from other types of not-found errors. For example, if you delete a dozen unhelpful pages or remove old products from your website, those deleted and removed pages could return a 410 status code instead of a 404 status code.

There is no SEO requirement that you must use a 410 response. Using the 410 can give search engines more information about what happened to the page and why you removed it. Some evidence suggests Google may crawl 410 errors less frequently than 404 errors, indicating Google does treat pages with a 410 status differently. In 2024, Google’s John Mueller said that the “difference in processing of 404 vs 410 is so minimal”, indicating that it would not affect SEO performance regardless of which status code was used. In my experience, errors returning a 410 status code might fall out of the index somewhat faster than a 404 status code, but it often is not worth the effort involved to use one status code over another.

Should I have a custom 404 page?

A custom 404 page contains a custom error page explaining that an error has occurred. It is designed to match the rest of your website. It includes your company’s branding, your website’s navigation, and includes design elements similar to the rest of your website. There are several reasons it makes sense to have a custom 404 page.

• Better User Experience. Creating a custom 404 error page is a key part of delivering a good broken user experience. By having a custom 404 error page, visitors will know they have arrived on the correct website and have a better chance of recovering from the error.
• Navigation & Search Options: You can include links to important pages, such as your homepage, popular products, or important articles. You can also include a search bar on your 404 error page. These features make it easier for visitors to find what they might be looking for or discover new areas of your site.
• Brand Consistency: Custom 404 pages allow you to maintain brand consistency across your website. This can reinforce your brand identity and messaging, even when the website has broken for the user.

A good example is GitHub’s custom 404 page. It explains something has gone wrong while maintaining their branding. This error page also provides an easy way for people to search for the content they were expecting to find. The navigation is also available along with information to contact GitHub’s support team.

What causes 404 errors on my website?

• Page Deletion. The most common reason you’ll see a 404 error is that visitors or search engine robots are trying to access pages that you removed from your website. Once a page is removed, it will no longer return content and anybody accessing that page will see an error.
• URL Change. 404 errors can also happen when URLs are changed. If you change the URL on a page, the old URL will return a not-found 404 error. Not-found errors caused by changed URLs are usually easy to fix by adding a redirect from the old URL to the new URL.
• User Error. Not-found 404 errors can also happen because of user error. People copy a URL incorrectly or they type the wrong URL into the browser. For example, you might run a new sale with ads telling people to visit “site.com/big-sale” but users might type “site.com/bg-sale” instead.
• Broken Links. Broken links are another common cause of 404 errors. When adding links to your website, email, or social share, it is easy to copy the URL incorrectly. I’ve done this myself. For example, I meant to copy a URL like “elementive.com/about-elementive” but copied it as “elementive.com/about-” and then pasted the wrong URL in an email. If somebody clicks on this incorrect URL, your website will return a not-found error page.

How can I prevent 404 errors caused by typos?

Sometimes people need to type a URL directly into their browser. I typically see this with URLs included in offline sales or marketing materials. When people type URLs, they can make mistakes and those mistakes can cause errors. You can predict some of the common mistakes and typos people may make. Then establish redirects taking visitors from the typo version of the URL to the non-typo version. You can track your website’s log files to see which of these redirects are used and then remove any that are not ultimately used.

Final Thoughts

Running a website for your business requires a lot of work. You must invest a lot of time, money, and effort to get people to notice, visit, and use your website. The last thing you want is to lose visitors as a result of 404 errors. By finding and fixing every 404 error that is costing you business, you can prevent a drop in rankings or conversions. If you need help, please contact me today, and let’s talk about what errors (404 or otherwise) are holding back your website and SEO performance.

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