Guide To Blogging

Editing The Wordpress 404 page

With many of the wordpress themes there is a default 404 page this means that if somebody comes to a link on your blog that you’ve deleted or a url has been incorrectly typed etc they will see a standard page not found message.

While this is pretty self-explanatory this page can be edited to make it more useful for your readers. You can add your own information here: from a search box to links to other sites or pages within your blog etc.

Depending on the blog theme you are using this error page can be changed in a few different ways.

Open your dashboard and click on presentation once there click on theme editor. To the right of the screen you will see a list of files that make up your blog template. If one of those is a 404 page, it’s simply a matter of opening it and changing or adding the information you want.

If you don’t have a 404 page you can try adding one in yourself by uploading the 404 page you see in your default wordpress template to the directory containing the template you currently use - once done, again it’s just a matter of adding the information you want. I’ve presently set up a very basic one here (though I’ve yet to edit it to align things properly etc)

* I recently added a quick guide to creating your own 404 page if your chosen blog template doesn’t have one and you can’t use the default page: Creating your own error 404 page 

You can also find more detailed information here: Creating an error 404 page

One tip I strongly recommend is to save the original version of any file you plan to edit, that way if something goes wrong you can either copy and paste over any changes you’ve made or upload and overwrite the changed file with the original.