Joomla! 3 SEO and Performance by Simon Kloostra

Author:Simon Kloostra
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Apress, Berkeley, CA

Offering a Custom 404 Page

You now know that if 404 errors cannot be prevented, a very ugly error page is displayed that is also completely different from the design of the rest of your site. It might even scare users away, because it almost seems as if they are on a different web site.

If you have bought your template from an established template provider, a custom 404 page will often be provided by them, but if they haven’t, or if you build your own templates, you should solve this problem.

Fortunately, doing so is very easy. You can even do it without using an extension, just a little bit of coding.

First, simply create an article on your web site that displays an attractive text that you would like to offer your visitors. You could offer your apologies for the error (never offend your users, even if the error is their fault), in addition to some links to possible locations on your site—first, a link to the home page, or to a search page. Optional, although recommended, is to set the Robots value for the article to NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, to prevent Google from indexing it.

Save and Close the article. Then, in the Article Manager, look up the article ID listed at the very end of the list, as shown in Figure 11-5, in which the ID is the number 9.

Figure 11-5.Article created to serve as 404 message, with Article ID 9 highlighted

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