What does error 404 mean and why does it occur?

You know what it’s like: you click on a link, but a page appears informing you that the requested website is not available. Often, error messages like “404 Not Found” or “404 Page Not Found” are displayed.

How does the “404 Not Found” message occur?

The 404 error is a stan­dard­ized HTTP status code. It is sent by the web server of a website to the web browser (the client) that made the HTTP request. The browser then displays this code as an error page.

The classic trigger for the error code occurs when web page content is removed or relocated to a different URL. However, other reasons can also cause a 404 HTTP page to appear in your browser—here’s an overview of some typical ones:

• The URL or its content (such as files or images) have either been deleted or moved (without adjusting the website’s internal links ac­cord­ing­ly).
• The URL was in­cor­rect­ly created (perhaps due to lack of care during setup or redesign), mislinked (e.g., through incorrect tagging), or in­cor­rect­ly entered in the browser bar.
• The web server re­spon­si­ble for the website is not op­er­a­tional or the con­nec­tion is in­ter­rupt­ed.
• The domain name accessed cannot be converted into an IP address in the Domain Name System.
• The domain name called up does not (or no longer) exist.

Dead links often remain for an extended period because the operators of the linking online service simply do not know that the linked content has been deleted or moved. This par­tic­u­lar­ly concerns:

• Search engines: Search results often include websites that are no longer available online (at least not under the specified URL).
• Linking web services such as blogs, news portals, etc.: They are often not informed that a webpage has been removed or given a new URL.

How do you fix error 404?

A 404 error is rarely something to celebrate – after all, it means you’re not seeing the content you expected. However, en­coun­ter­ing a 404 error page doesn’t always indicate that the in­for­ma­tion is com­plete­ly gone. Sometimes, the issue is quickly iden­ti­fied, and the webpage you were looking for can still be accessed. So, how can you fix the “404 Not Found” error? It’s rec­om­mend­ed to try these solutions in the order listed.

Reload the website

The 404 code may appear simply because the page didn’t load correctly. You can quickly check this by reloading the page using the ap­pro­pri­ate button in your browser or pressing the F5 key.

Check the URL

Whether you typed the web address manually in the URL bar or followed a link, errors can easily occur. Therefore, it’s important to check the specified path of the webpage. Perhaps you, or the person who created the link, made a typo in the URL. In addition to typos, missing or incorrect slashes can also trigger the error message. This issue is easier to spot with well-struc­tured Clean URLs (also known as “friendly URLs”), as they use readable words instead of confusing ab­bre­vi­a­tions for the path.

Search the folder structure

If a URL struc­tured as example.com/Folder1/Folder2/Folder3 results in a 404 error page, you can check in the preceding folder (in this case example.com/Folder1/Folder2) to see if the desired page is linked there. To do this, simply remove the last specified folder in the URL bar**. The webpage you are looking for might have been provided with a new link, which can be found on the parent page. If you don’t find it there, you can continue to search the higher-level folders for in­for­ma­tion and links to the webpage you want. If you also have no luck there and end up on the homepage, try the next method.

Use the website’s search function

Many websites offer a search function on the homepage. By entering one or more keywords, you can also find the webpage you are looking for, even if it is now displayed under a different URL than you thought.

Use a search engine

Fur­ther­more, you have the option to use your preferred search engine to hunt for the webpage. If the desired page still exists, you often find it by entering the website domain and a keyword-based de­scrip­tion of the topic you’re looking for.

Clear cache and cookies

If you can access the website from another device and the HTTP 404 error only appears re­peat­ed­ly on a specific device, the error might be related to your browser. Clearing the browser cache and all cookies for the website could allow the page to be displayed on that device again.

Contact the website

If the pre­vi­ous­ly mentioned methods don’t work, your next step is to contact the website ad­min­is­tra­tors directly (you can usually find their contact in­for­ma­tion in the imprint or on the “about page”). The website operators should be able to tell you if the subpage you’re looking for still exists. If it has moved to a new URL, you’ll provide crucial in­for­ma­tion to the web­mas­ters, allowing them to resolve the 404 error by setting up a domain redirect, which will au­to­mat­i­cal­ly redirect visitors from the old address to the new one.

Do HTTP 404 errors affect ranking?

Search engines like Google and Bing view 404 errors neg­a­tive­ly, es­pe­cial­ly when a website has many of them. When search engine crawlers fre­quent­ly encounter 404 errors on a site, they infer that the website is poorly main­tained. Broken links, therefore, harm the site’s ranking, as websites with numerous 404 error pages are down­grad­ed in search engine results or may not be indexed at all. This can result in sig­nif­i­cant losses in visitor traffic for the linked webpage.

Moreover, a website with multiple broken links or a dead landing page (a page accessed via the search engine) risks losing the trust of users in the online presence. Many users then may not bother to continue searching for the desired content on the site—after all, when en­coun­ter­ing an error 404 message, users cannot be sure if those contents still exist.

Tip: Want to know how well your website is found via search engines? Test it right here with the free website checker:

How to identify error 404 on your website

For website operators, it is important to prevent any HTTP 404 pages. This applies to avoiding 404 errors on their own website (internal error 404) as well as linking to 404 pages on other online offers (external 404 error page). There are various free tools that make searching for broken links sig­nif­i­cant­ly easier. Three of the best-known are:

• Google Search Console (formerly “Google Webmaster Tools”): If you own a Google account and your website is reg­is­tered, the Google Search Console is a great option. The 404 errors found by the Google Crawler are displayed in Google’s web tool and can also be marked as corrected here. It includes other features as well—such as viewing errors in the robots.txt and using crawling sta­tis­tics to track how often the Google Crawler has searched the website.
• Dead Link Checker: One of the simplest and fastest tools for finding in­ter­nal­ly and ex­ter­nal­ly linked 404 pages is the Dead Link Checker. With this web app, you simply enter the internet address of the re­spec­tive website into the input line and start the check. You have the option to verify a single webpage or the entire website. The ap­pli­ca­tion lists all detected error pages with status code and URL.
• W3C Link Checker: The World Wide Web Con­sor­tium’s (W3C) online tool conducts an extensive test of each page of a website. Ac­cord­ing­ly, the checking process takes longer than with other web apps for link ver­i­fi­ca­tion. The W3C Link Checker works similarly to the Dead Link Checker: you enter the URL to be checked into the des­ig­nat­ed field and let the tool do the rest. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, you can specify some extra details during the website in­spec­tion.

How to create an error 404 page

In some content man­age­ment systems, a 404 error page is au­to­mat­i­cal­ly generated when a website’s URL cannot be found. These are standard pages for marking an HTTP 404 error, often lacking orig­i­nal­i­ty in design. However, they can typically be cus­tomized through specific CMS ex­ten­sions. If your CMS does not offer a function to create or modify a 404 page, or if your site is solely based on HTML, PHP, etc., it becomes a bit more com­pli­cat­ed. In that case, you can create an error page as follows:

1. If not already created, create an error page (404.html or 404.php) in the root directory.
2. Open the .htaccess file (or create one if it doesn’t exist) in the root directory.
3. Add the entry ErrorDocument 404 /404.html and save the change. This code generates the error page.
4. To check, access a non-existent webpage under your website’s domain – the error 404 should now appear in the browser window.

Why should you create a custom 404 page?

A standard 404 error page is certainly better than none at all. However, a custom page for the error 404 is ben­e­fi­cial for several reasons:

✓ Output of the ap­pro­pri­ate status code: For example, if the requested content is no longer available on the website, it should be ex­plic­it­ly marked with the iden­ti­fi­er “410 Gone” – this code indicates that the sought content has been per­ma­nent­ly deleted.

✓ In­cor­po­ra­tion of ad­di­tion­al links: Through your custom error page, you can offer further links (for example, to your homepage or subpages that have content overlap with the orig­i­nal­ly requested page). A search function for your website can also be provided here.

✓ Con­sis­tent style: By ensuring that the error message design matches the style of your website, you have already laid the foun­da­tion for a good 404 error page.

✓ Positive aspects for visitors: With a creative 404 message, you can even appease some visitors. They will still be dis­ap­point­ed not to find the promised content on your website. However, an original and/or amusing 404 webpage can def­i­nite­ly make up for this letdown.