What a 404 page is, and why the status code matters

What a not-found page is for

A visitor mistypes an address, follows an old link, or lands on a page you removed. The not-found page is where they end up. Its job is to say plainly that nothing is here and to hand them a way onward: the homepage, the main services, a phone number.

It is a page people actually see. Old links live for years in emails, bookmarks and other sites. A blank server error, or a page that pretends to be the homepage, wastes the visit.

A good not-found page is a small courtesy. A visitor who lands there, sees your name and finds a way back has had a fine visit. One who sees a server error has had a bad one, and remembers it.

What the status code is and why it matters

Every response from a web server carries a number. 200 means here is the page. 301 means it moved, go here instead. 404 means nothing is at this address. Browsers mostly ignore the number. Search engines do not.

When a crawler gets a 404, it stops trying, drops the address from the index over time and moves on. When it gets a 200, it takes the page seriously, reads it and considers indexing it. That is the whole difference.

The soft 404, and why it is a problem

A soft 404 is a page that says not found in words but returns 200 in the header. It is common. A site returns its not-found template as a normal page, or redirects every missing address to the homepage, or shows an empty search result.

Search engines treat a soft 404 as a real page with thin content. Search Console flags them in the Pages report. At best they waste crawl time. At worst an index fills with copies of your not-found page at many addresses.

Redirecting every missing address to the homepage is the same problem in a different coat. The visitor did not ask for the homepage, and the engine sees a redirect that lies.

How to check your own

Type a made-up address on your domain. Open your browser's developer tools, choose the Network tab, and reload. The first row is the page itself. The Status column should read 404. If it reads 200, you have a soft 404.

Then check what a removed page returns. If you deleted a service, its old address should return 404, or 301 to the page that replaced it. Not 200 with a blank layout.

What the builder ships

Every site Website Builder Studio publishes has a branded not-found page served with a real not-found status. It looks like the rest of your site and returns the real code. You do not set it up; it is there when the site goes live.

The check that runs before anything publishes covers the rest of the addresses too. Each page gets a clean address, the sitemap lists real pages, and each page carries a canonical link. It is validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards. Fewer broken addresses to start with means fewer visitors on the not-found page at all.

If you are curious what it looks like, type a made-up address on any site the builder made. The in-app assistant can also explain what any screen does, including this one.

What to put on the page

Keep it short and calm. Do not apologize at length and do not joke at length. One light line is fine. The visitor wants out, and the page's job is the exit.

Then check the links on it, because a broken link on the not-found page is the one place a visitor will notice.

Search engines and the AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Google's AI answers need nothing from this page; it is for people. Make it genuinely useful to the one person who reached it by mistake, and it has done its job.

• A plain sentence: this page does not exist.
• A link to the homepage and the two or three pages people want most.
• Your phone number, because the person may just want to call.
• Your usual header and footer, so it is clearly still your site.
• No automatic redirect and no countdown.