Custom 404 Page Not Found
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Simon Edge Sports WH
The current 404 Page Not Found is a very poor generic design. It is a weak link which makes the site design (and therefore our company) look amateur and gives a bad impression. It should be very easy to allow this to be custom so that accounts that would like a custom page design for this can have it / pay for it. At the moment, you do not allow for this option. Please can you look after this quick request.
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
I'm looking into ways we can improve this, so we can get the customers logo, fonts and general styles on the page, with links back to the site so it is less of a deadend.
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Scott
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime it’s been almost 3 years of trying to get this to happen, any progress please?
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Merged in a post:
Error Page Please - GA4 benefits
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Scott
Can we have a proper 404 error page please? The request has been kicking around for at least 3 years and there are mentions around it on here with upvotes, but no error page.
My reasoning is different hence a new post - I have just been discussing GA4 reporting and we cannot currently track page errors as the platform does not have an error page. If it did, and therefore a page title, then page_title from the data layer could be used in GA4 to track all 404 pages, and see the origin URLS for them for easy fixing or flagging to Citrus Lime.
Having this all in one place on analytics would be a decent time saver...
And thats in addition to the much better customer experience visiting our sites, or when the site is down for maitainance. Or just down...
Shirin Sadr
https://citruslime.canny.io/ecommerce-website/p/custom-404-page-not-found This does already exist with a lot of upvotes.
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Scott
Shirin Sadr: Yepp for a slightly different reason so maybe CL can combine and maybe get this one underway 👍
Shirin Sadr
Scott: Sorry misread your "my reasoning is different"! 😅
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Having said all of that something simply like AirBnB's might be a way forward where it is simple text/html without any database driven content.
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Steven Sproat
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime: Hi Neil, yes, we've been asking for something like this for a while, just want the 404/500 page shown in the context of our site - e.g. header/footer with the 'error' text shown where page content would go
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Simon Edge Sports WH
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime: Absolutely, that is all we are also requesting, that would be a good change.
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Will Condie
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime: What about the google dino jump game! hahaha
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Will Condie
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime: Something like you suggested would be awesome. Would it be custom for each client?
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Simon Edge Sports WH
Will Condie: Good suggestion - even if they charged a nominal fee to customise it per account request, so that it would not look exactly like all other Citrus Lime websites.
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Scott
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime: Is this happening? Its also needed for GA4 as it allows you to log 404 errors in Analytics rather than having to use (or pay for) 3rd party software.
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
We've done this deliberately. The danger with putting content on an error page, is this in itself can trip out and cause an error. This is really bad for search engine crawlers and thus search rankings as you can create redirect loops. I have seen this in production on other sites.
From a technical point of view error pages are designed to serve a simple message and a HTTP Status code to tell a crawler or browser that something has gone wrong. I appreciate that some other sites have headed down this route but I don't think, from a geek point of view, it is wise to do so.
Shirin Sadr
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime: I have to say I disagree that its not wise to do so. There isnt danger of creating a redirect loop unless for some reason you are putting unique links onto the custom page, no? Of course 404s are "bad for search engine crawlers" but the 404 exists whether the it has a custom design or not which is why this point is relating specifically to UX. Here's a good article that includes some examples from various large sites https://susodigital.com/blog/how-to-handle-404-pages-for-seo.
Equally, there are other benefits to a custom 404 page as mentioned in the article above and as Scott has raised on this post too - https://citruslime.canny.io/ecommerce-website/p/error-page-please-ga4-benefits
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Will Condie
Great Idea! Branded Error pages!