Don’t Forget To Specify a 404 Page For Your Cloudflare Pages Site!

I was removing an old attempt at making linkstats and I was testing the redirect support (which I’ve removed for now) and entered in the wrong URL. Instead of returning some sort of 404, it stayed on the same page (well / it turns out). Turns out this is by design. As per Cloudflare’s documentation on serving pages,

If your project does not include a top-level 404.html file, Pages assumes that you are deploying a single-page application… Pages’ default single-page application behavior matches all incoming paths to the root (/), allowing you to capture URLs like /about or /help and respond to them from within your SPA.

Don’t know why SPAs do that but its why Cloudflare does it. To address this, I just yanked a random 404 page I had lying around and I used that.