When building a website, everyone gets swept up in the excitement of the new design and features, pages such as the 404 page can get overlooked. Sure, browsers offer default 404 pages, but those do nothing for your website and can hurt the experience of your users
A 404 page is your website’s way of saying sorry for not being able to find the content the user was looking for. If the page is left as the default error page, it can come across as lazy and uncaring. Use this opportunity to instead make a good impression and retain users.
It is often said that a company’s website is it’s best salesperson. They have the most customer interactions out of anybody in the company. It only makes sense that the same customer service rules that apply to normal salespeople should apply to the website as well.
Let’s say you walk into a grocery store to buy some food. You walk up and down the aisles until you reach the breakfast aisle only to find your favorite brand of cereal is no longer there on the shelves. Confused and worried that your morning routine of coffee and delicious sugary cereal will be thrown off, you find an employee to help you out.
Hopefully the employee tries their best to remedy this awful situation by finding a replacement cereal so your shopping experience isn’t ruined. Good customer service not only helps fix a bad situation, but lets your customers know that if something unexpected does happen, they can still count on you.
Now, imagine if instead of receiving good customer service, you found an employee who did the bare minimum. They tell you your cereal is out of stock and then turn their back and walk away. As a customer, this just makes the whole situation much worse. Not only did they not have what you were looking for, but it’s as if they don’t care to begin with.
These experiences aren’t just unique to physical stores. They happen thousands of times everyday online as well. Your 404 page is your chance to apologize and provide a good experience for your user, even if you don’t have the content they are looking for.
Making a good impression with the 404 page and offering helpful tools helps users stay on your website for longer. When users encounter a 404 page, almost 74% of users leave and don’t return. That’s a huge number leaving because of an error. That’s why it’s important to develop a well designed error page and provide them the ability to dive back into your website.