See below for how I found my answer.
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I searched how to make a 404 page for my website on the search engine Qwant. Below is a screen capture of the six top sites.
I looked through the first two and found my answer.
The first site is called Portent, a blog post. It’s URL is https://www.portent.com/blog/seo/create-a-great-404-page.htm it is called “How to Create a Great Custom 404 Error Page (with Examples)”
The author is Evan Hall, updated on September 7, 2022.
He provides a lot of detail for coders to change their site html. I’m not confident with coding and will continue my search for information, but I did find this image of Tripadvisor’s 404 error page. It is a great example.
Trip Advisor’s 404 page is lovely. I’ll leave it here for reference. Even after reading Portent’s page on “How to Create a Great Custom 404 Error Page (with Examples)” I still have no idea how to make one for my site.
The second text search result comes from Medium. Written by Rachit and published in Design Recipes.
In the Medium article the author writes “You may be tempted to believe that you have to be a coder to create a good 404 error page. Thanks to this plugin, everyone can conceive an attractive 404 error page. Besides, the 404page plugin isn’t as complex as page builders are. You focus on your final product – a good 404 error page.”
After reading the Medium page I found recommendations at the very bottom of the article for people who don’t write code. That is me. If you don’t write code you can try using the 404 page plug-in posted below. I’ll did. Works Great and there are several other 404 plugin tabs if you want to try them instead.
After reading through the medium post I was still confused. I wondered if it would work because the plug-in is no longer being supported by the developer and if I could do it. So I took a break. Had some lunch and a little nap. When I came back I was ready to give it a try.
Here is how I did it. Go to the plugins tab in your dashboard.
Click on the add new plugins button.
Type Search for 404page in keyword search bar
Choose your plug-in
Hit the install now button…
I installed and activated the plugin. Next, I created a 404 page the same as you do the rest of your pages on your site. Then from your WordPress admin dashboard, go to Appearance > 404 Error Page and choose the page you have just built to be your site custom 404 error page.
This plugin doesn’t allow redirecting webpages; it just tells the search bots that the webpage is missing. So that is good for some reason. This 404 page is a personal project of a developer which he is no longer actively supporting. It has 100,000 active installs and an almost perfect rating – 4.9 stars out of 5.
I was able to get my custom 404 page made.
I am done here for today. Looks like this job is done!
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Thanks for reading!
Lisa
