No matter what type of site you may have, 404 errors may cost you something. It might not be money, but it’s costing you something. Retail sites could be losing money. Other types of sites, however, may be losing something just as valuable…pageviews…return visitors…things like that.

On your site, what do you use as a measure of site performance? How have you been doing lately? Maybe you’ve been enjoying high numbers for a while, or maybe you’ve been getting used to steady KPI growth. How much would your website performance improve if your traffic and/or pageviews grew by another 10-25% percent?

The truth is, your site could potentially do that extra 10-25%, you just don’t benefit from it because your visitors are encountering 404 page not found errors. These visitors can be potential browsers and buyers, but once they hit that 404 page, they’ll leave and bring their money to another site.

How do you keep these people on your site? There are two paths you can take: 1. Optimize your 404 page WITHOUT trying to ID and eliminate the errors from occurring or 2. Optimize your 404 page while attempting to ID and eliminate the 404 errors from occurring on your site.

Option #1: Optimize 404 Page ONLY
This can be done through a great custom 404 page. There are certain guidelines for an awesome 404 page to follow when working on your custom 404 page. Some of these guidelines are:

Optimizing your 404 error page will definitely help keep some visitors on your site. There are some downfalls, however, to only optimizing your 404 page. First, 404 errors will keep occurring on your page, which is bad from an SEO standpoint. Search engine spiders don’t like 404 error pages and question the importance of an error filled website. Also, even if you have a great 404 page, not all of your visitors will make a second attempt to find what they were looking for. Some of them will still just leave. For a way to keep some of those visitors, read Option #2.

Option #2: Optimize 404 Page WITH ID & Elimination Process
If you decide that you want to keep more users than an optimized 404 page could keep on its own, then do this option after completing option #1 successfully. Get a system in place to track your 404 errors. Google Analytics has the capability to track your 404 errors. Simply tracking your 404 errors, however, is just the first step. You’ll need a tool that will tell you where the 404 errors are being generated, and then create SEO-friendly 301 redirects to send visitors and search engine robots to a functional page. Tools, like Errorlytics, help identify 404s, the source of the 404s and then gives you the opportunity to create rules to automatically redirect these 404s to the proper working web page. Taking the couple extra steps is a small investment of time, that may have huge returns in preserving and/or improve site performance.

In conclusion, don’t forget about the 404 error page. If you give it the same attention you give your other pages, it will return the love and bring in some visitors that you’ve been missing out on.