"Page Not Found" Is Not Good Enough
The default 404 page is a dead end. White page. Error message. No navigation. No suggestions. No reason to stay.
Your visitor came looking for something. The URL was wrong or the page was deleted. But they still want something. Help them find it.
What a Good 404 Page Includes
Your site navigation. So visitors can easily go somewhere else on your site.
A search bar. Let them search for what they were looking for.
Popular or suggested content. Links to your most valuable pages.
A friendly message. "This page does not exist, but here is what you might be looking for." Not "Error 404: Resource not found."
The SEO Angle
A custom 404 page does not directly improve rankings. But it reduces bounce rate from broken links. Visitors stay on your site instead of hitting the back button.
More importantly: make sure your 404 pages actually return a 404 status code. A custom 404 page that returns a 200 status code is a soft 404 — and Google will try to index it.
The Quick Win
Design a 404 page that is helpful and on-brand. Make sure it returns the correct 404 HTTP status code. Then set up monitoring to find and fix the broken links that trigger it. Check Google Search Console regularly for crawl errors that point to missing pages.
One of 113 items in our free SEO checklist. No credit card. 30 seconds.