Stop losing valuable visitors and increase your traffic in minutes by customizing your sites error pages. Chances are you are losing visitors to your website and you don’t even know it! Let me explain…

If you’ve been surfing the net for a while chances are you have come across a link that didn’t work. You probably received some numbered error message like “page not found” or “error 404 or 401”.

Anytime I see one of these “page not found” messages I cringe at the fact that another person out there is letting visitors just needlessly pass them by.

You see, these error messages come about because the page you are looking for no longer exists, it has been changed, or possibly the person who created the link you clicked on accidentally made a typo! Lucky for you, you can save yourself from losing visitors like this by customizing your error pages.

Don’t think you have any visitors going to the wrong page?

Think Again!

Check your web logs and chances are you do! When I first check my web logs for 404 error messages I realized I was losing over 400 visitors a month!! Now that my site has grown and is more popular than ever, the traffic to old pages and incorrect links has grown tremendously! Only now I am not losing any more visitors. My visitors no longer see a generic 404 error page because they are redirected to my main site!

Let me give you an example of how the typical visitor is lost…

Let’s say a potential customer of yours wants to go to your website: www.yoursite.com/1234.html

But they make a simple typo and accidentally type in www.yoursite.com/9234.html

Since the page 9234 doesn’t exist your potential customer is automatically taken to a generic “error 404, page not found” page and lost forever.

This can also happen if someone links to your site incorrectly (a common occurrence) or goes to an old page you no longer have or have moved.

You don’t want to lose your visitors and potential customers because of other people’s mistakes do you?

I didn’t think so.

So how do you customize your error pages?

First off, don’t buy any of those crazy packages out there that claim to create customized error pages for you or set them up. It’s much too easy to do it yourself and it’s free.

Depending on your web hosting company there may be a button in your control panel to easily customize the pages or you may have to edit your .htaccess file.

Don’t get intimidated because it’s really quite simple. If you aren’t sure what setup your hosting company has then just ask them. If they are worth hosting with they will be able to tell you.

There are also different types of error messages and different ways to customize them. First we’ll look at the different basic error messages:

• 400 – Bad request
  This error message appears when there is a typo in the URL requested, or the server doesn’t recognize which file you want, or maybe there is special access required to view the page.
• 401 – Unauthorized
  This usually means you are trying to access a site that is protected.
• 403 – Forbidden or “Connection refused by host”
  This is for password protected pages or files and appears to those who do not have access.
• 404 – Not found
  This is by far the most common message found while surfing. It means the server can’t find the document you are asking for either, because of a mistyped URL, or perhaps the file has been moved, the address changed, or doesn’t even exist any longer.
• 500 – Internal Server Error
  This one is a bit tricky. It could mean your access provider’s server is on the fritz, or the gateway for your company (if you access the Net from your place of business) is not functioning, or maybe some of your own equipment is foobar.

So which ones should you customize?

All of them if you want to, I usually do. Definitely customize your 404 pages and I suggest customizing all of them if you have the time to do so.

Here are a few different ways to customize your error pages…

1. You can customize each one individually with html that states the error, your main website address and your email address.
2. My Favorite – You can make the page redirect automatically to your main page, this is what I do so all my visitors go to the main site directly. You can do this when you modify your .htaccess file which I will talk about in a minute.
3. You can make a generic page with banners, advertisements and popup ads. I know several people who actually buy expired domain names and customize the error pages with banner ads to other programs they make money off of. This can be a very profitable move, especially if the expired domain has many links to various pages that no longer exist.

Once you have created your HTML error pages you then need to set your website up so that your visitors are directed to them.

Some web hosting companies have a button where you can log in and just insert the HTML for the corresponding error page. Depending on how your host is set up you can either enter the link or just the HTML for each error message. If your hosting company does not offer this option then you will need to edit or create an .htaccess file.

An .htaccess file is an plain text document that can be placed in any directory on your website. The .htaccess file is created using a text editor such as Wordpad or Notepad. You must upload your .htaccess file with FTP software using ASCII mode. If you put the .htaccess file in your root directory, it will affect all directories beneath it. Don’t forget the to put the “.” before the “htaccess”.

To point a certain error message to a certain file, put this in your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yoursite.com/filename.html

Where 404 is the error message you are redirecting, and
http://www.yoursite.com/filename.html is the page you wish people to see when they receive the error.

So for example if you wanted to redirect some of your error messages to your main site this is what your .htaccess file could look like:

• ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yoursite.com/index.htm
• ErrorDocument 400 http://www.yoursite.com/index.htm
• ErrorDocument 500 http://www.yoursite.com/index.htm

Once you’ve customized your error pages and and tested them out you can sleep soundly knowing that no more visitors will be lost in the tangled web of the internet. You may even notice increased sales! Wouldn’t that be nice?