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Qurratulain Akhtar
“The page you’re looking for doesn’t exist”, “Page not found” are very familiar terms that most of internet users happen to find everywhere round. In technical terms it’s 404 error. Generally that’s all about this type of error, but getting into a little more details, this 404 page on a site has close connections with traffic retention and bounce rate.
404 page does not only bounce your traffic, but you may also lose a potential client in many cases, so improving these pages is of utmost importance. Doing all this is just fun if you place yourself in shoe of your visitor and:
- Apologize for the inconvenience your visitors have faced
- Set a permanent redirect if your content has been moved to a new location
This is what you may normally be doing, and so all others will be, so try something different and, customize your 404 page. You may:
- Match it’s design with main site’s template
- Add an appealing message, mainly offering a search option in it
- Create an internal search engine, in case if you’ve a big site with tons of content.
- Try Custom Google Search Engine, and host the results on your own site.
These work fine, but since its all about how innovative you’re, you can come up with something more that helps engaging users as well as offering them what they were exactly looking for. Few more ideas from my side can be to:
- Put a proper structured sitemap on your 404 page.
- Ask the user to suggest if something is missing.
- Get broken links report from users by providing them a simple form on 404 page.
Retaining visitors of your website is as important as it is to gain traffic. This helps reducing your bounce rate and increasing probability of sales along with developing visitors’ trust. The methods of retaining targeted traffic may vary with the niche market, but the above mentioned case is almost same for all sorts of sites. So, be inquisitive to find what’s wrong, and be innovative to take the issue as an opportunity to do something new!
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