How to customize a 404 error page

So, you are thrilled about your new website or blog. You want it to rank well in the search engines and bring you mountains of money. It's a long road, but every trip begins with one single step. You'll need some good design, a bit of luck and a fair amount of good quality content. As they say, content is not the king anymore, but good quality, fresh content is the new king. Some SEO knowledge is also required. But, let's get to the point.

If a visitor of your website use his keyboard to access one of your pages and mistype your URL, or you mistype a URL when posting to various websites, or your page was moved or deleted, your visitor will face an ugly "Not found" page, like the one in the right column. This webpage is a default page servers will display if a visitor is trying to access a non-existing webpage.

The good news is there is a way to edit the default "not found" webpage. You can replace it with anything you want: a redirect link, a short message for your visitor, a link to your homepage, a link to an affiliate page and so on. How you can do this. Here are the steps.

1. Login to your cPanel account (this is usually located at www.yourdomain.com/cpanel), look for Error pages and click the item.

2. You will get a screen like the one in the image below. Click on 404 (not found). You will be able to edit the page the way you want.

Here you can see a customized 404 error page.

Using a customized 404 error page is a beneficial thing. Still, some limitations apply. If you want to be more than a newbie on this matter, please read this page.

Save your new 404 error page and you're good to go.