Making a Useful 404 Page To My Site

One of the first things I’m working on with my site is a better 404 page. While they’re a lot of interesting 404 pages, I’m not very funny so I decided to keep it functional instead. The main idea is to:

1. Help users find what they’re looking for.
2. Allow me to check what pages resulted in a 404 so I can fix them and,
3. Be as small as possible to not waste precious bandwidth.

Many iterations later, I’ve settled on a basic 404 page featuring:

• some simple styling for responsiveness,
• an explanation as to why the page doesn’t exist (it’s likely that I haven’t moved the page in yet),
• links to where I can find the page on a web archive, and
• a mailto link to report the 404 page.

It isn’t much but it’s good enough for now. In the future, I hope to link to a search page, report 404 pages automatically (through analytics or something) and add dark mode so that users aren’t blinded if they end up on a 404 page.