1-Hour Improvements: Turn Your Error Page Into A Navigational Tool

It’s easy to get stuck into your routine & tough to figure out which tasks are going to make the difference with your website. There are certain ‘golden’ tasks you can perform on your website that will provide a much higher return on your time. Finding that golden 20% means spending your time in a way that’s going to benefit you the most. Here’s a quick, easy task you can complete fairly quickly that will provide value for years to come.

Turning an Error into a Tool

If you go to http://www.yoursite.com/asdfgh what happens? Error pages (often called ‘404s’ because they return a ‘404 error’ code to the browser) mean that something has gone wrong on your site. Often when a visitor hits an error code they will simply move on to another site. Here are some simple things you can include on your 404 page to avoid that:

1. Apologise to the visitor briefly because you can’t provide the page they’re looking for
2. Offer the content that is most likely to appeal to them (eg. links to your most popular content, links to content in the same directory as the missing page)
3. Include a ’search’ box, allowing them to (hopefully) easily find what they were looking for
4. Briefly explain what you/your company is about, to reassure visitors they’re in the right place if they’ve landed straight onto that error page

If you’ve already done all of the above, one more useful tip is to make sure your error page doesn’t look like an error page. That sounds counterintuitive, but it works: Many visitors will immediately see the ‘Error’ style page & navigate away, or hit the back button. If you give them a chance to see that you’re providing useful content before their automatic response kicks in, you have a chance at shuffling them toward your useful content rather than losing them.