How to Create a WordPress 404 Page that Converts

We recently decided to totally trash this blog and start afresh by moving over to WordPress. As we have a number of established visitors and to ensure that they and new visitors would not be disadvantaged if they clicked on a page that no longer exists, we knew we needed to create a 404 page that would keep our visitors on our site.

We didn’t just want your typical ‘404 Page Not Found’ message to appear as that would quickly have our visitors clicking the back button. Instead we created a totally unique page that would hopefully grab their attention and keep them reading.

Now I won’t go into how to create the page itself as WordPress.org has a very detailed and a fairly easy to understand tutorial so just take a look at that if you need help editing or creating the page itself. What we want to talk about here is how to make that page convert or at the very least get the reader to stay and check out your blog.

Now most people neglect their 404 page – in fact, many don’t even know it exists and so they are missing out on making good of an opportunity to keep their visitors. Just by making a few simple changes you can make a huge difference in preventing visitors from clicking that nasty old back button.

So here are some suggestions that you can use to make your 404 page rock!

The Header

The first thing you want to do when you edit your 404 page is to delete the bit that says ‘Error 404 – Not Found’ or anything resembling that. In fact, you don’t want people to even know that they have hit an error page at all. If they have any idea at all that they haven’t found what they clicked on then they will hit the back button real quick.

Replace this text with something that grabs their attention. In other words, avoid being boring. Take your time with this and think about how you can get their attention fast. For instance, you could use one of the following:

Wow, how did you manage to find this page? No one is supposed to see this! But I guess now that you are here I can let you in on a little secret….

This is your lucky day! You’ve found our hidden page of goodies including an offer that we know you can’t resist…

You see how these messages grab the readers’ attention.. What would you rather read – a boring message that says ‘Error 404 – Page Not Found’ or one of the ones listed above?

The Content

So now that the header is out of the way, we need to add a bit of content. We don’t want the 404 page to be a mile long page of content. Keep it relatively short – a couple of paragraphs at the most.

The first part of the content should be two or three sentences that let the reader know the benefits of staying on your site. They’ve obviously come to your site expecting to find something and haven’t found it so you need to give them some wow factor to make them want to at least click on one of the links you are about to give them.

For instance, if you had a blog about dogs you might want to add the following:

This is your lucky day as you have found the best dog resource on the internet. We have the biggest list of dog names with over 10,000 names listed and training guides to tame your little terror!

Keep it short and simple as we really want to lead them to the next section which are your links.

The Links

Just after the content on your 404 page you want to start adding some links. These links will serve two purposes:

1. They will drive visitors to some of the best pages on your site. These will be pages that you know are exceptional and will keep the reader’s attention. Once they have read one of your best blog posts then they are more likely to want to stay and read more.

2. They will drive visitors (via affiliate links) to the affiliate websites where you can pick up a commission.

My preference is to use a mix of both types of link. On our 404 page for this blog we have links to our Squidoo ECourse, to Wealthy Affiliate University (via an affiliate link), to a review of Affiliate Organizer that we wrote up for this blog and to a free eBook that we recommend.

We set up our links as dot points. So if we stay with our dog example, we might set up the links as follows:

Here are some of our most popular posts:

• The Top 10 Favorite Dog Names
• Surefire Ways to Get Your Dog to Sit on Command
• A Review of the Doohicky Dog Bed

We could then finish it off by adding the following:

Sign up for our newsletter today and receive our FREE Dog Training eBook.

So let’s put it all together now and see what we have come up with:

Wow, how did you manage to find this page? No one is supposed to see this! But I guess now that you are here I can let you in on a little secret….

This is your lucky day as you have found the best dog resource on the internet. We have the biggest list of dog names with over 10,000 names listed and training guides to tame your little terror!

Here are some of our most popular posts:

• The Top 10 Favorite Dog Names
• Surefire Ways to Get Your Dog to Sit on Command
• A Review of the Doohicky Dog Bed

Sign up for our newsletter today and receive our FREE Dog Training eBook.

So there you have it – a 404 page that gets your visitors to do something other than click on that back button.

Update: At the end of the original vesion of this post we indicated that you could also add Google Ads to your 404 page but J.Noronha (see comments below) has kindly informed us that it is against Googles Terms ands Conditions. Thanks for that info!