Best Examples of How to Create a 404 Error Page

March 19, 2013
by Alin
Inspiration
1

A custom 404 error page will encourage your users to spend more time on your website if it’s carefully executed. This kind of page must be easy to understand, friendly ( keep the overall site feeling ) and sometimes interactive. You’ll see some of the examples below that use small games in their 404 not found page to engage the user.

In order to maintain visitors on your website, here are some useful tips that you can consider when creating the 404 error page:

Link Back to Your Homepage
Keep the Overall Website Design
Display Links to Popular Articles
Create a Search Form
Keep it Simple and Understandable

After you’ve created the 404 page make sure to configure the .htaccess file for custom 404 redirection. All you have to do is open the .htaccess and write the code below:

ErrorDocument 404 /pathToYourFile/404.html

Make sure your 404 page isn’t found by the search engines by include the link of the page in the robots.txt file on your web server.

Here in this article you’ll find some new and creative 404 error page designs. I hope this collection will inspire and help you out when you start designing your own 404 page.

You can also check our previously article 30 Creative 404 Error Pages for more inspiration.