You’re probably familiar with any major company having a nice, custom page when you land on a page that no longer exists. In this post, I will describe how you can add your own custom error pages with htaccess (assuming you are the webmaster).
First off, here are some common error codes and what they mean:
400: Bad Request
401: Authorization required
403: Forbidden
404: Page not found
500: Server error
Now, those might not mean much to you, but the most common error page and one that you should set is 404. If you so much as rename a file, visitors may be coming from google and the file doesn’t exist. Instead of seeing a bland white page (or your host’s 404 page), you should change it.
Here’s a sample .htaccess file
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
ErrorDocument 500 /500.html
ErrorDocument 400 /400.html
ErrorDocument 401 /401.html
ErrorDocument 403 /403.html
You don’t have to name the file to match the error number, you can name the 404 error page “GoodbyeWorld.html” if you wanted.
Now: Some tips for creating this file. On Windows, you cannot easily create this file. It doesn’t like having only extensions for filenames. To solve this problem, simply create your file and name it htaccess or htaccess.txt. Then, upload it to your web server and from there you can change its name (from ftp or a control panel).
The most common problem people may face is due to their hosts: Many hosts, more specifically, many free hosts do not allow you to have a custom .htaccess file.
