Max Beatty

One of the first things you learn to do in web devel­op­ment is make sure every­thing works. Do all of your links work cor­rectly? Do all of your images show up? And as your web­site pro­gresses and grows, is some­one link­ing to one of my pages that doesn’t exist any­more? Or are peo­ple look­ing for a page they think should exist but doesn’t? You can check on all of that with some basic test­ing and look­ing through bor­ing server logs, or you could make your web­site work for you and tell you when some­one couldn’t find something.

In Word­Press, when a page or file can’t be found a user is redi­rected to the 404.php page. Mine looks like this:

404 Land­ing Page for MaxBeatty.com

I came across a great tuto­r­ial from Net­tuts+ for cre­at­ing a PHP auto-mailer for 404 and 403 errors, but since Word­Press already had it’s own 404.php page, I decided to sim­plify their method a bit.

At the top of my Word­Press theme’s 404.php page, I added some sim­ple PHP to get envi­ron­men­tal vari­ables, con­struct an email, then mail it to myself before load­ing the rest of the page.

Replace:[php]<?php include_once ‘header.php’;?>[/php]

With:[php]<?php
# Gather vis­i­tor infor­ma­tion
$ip = getenv("REMOTE_ADDR");                // IP Address
$server_name = getenv("SERVER_NAME");       // Server Name
$request_uri = getenv("REQUEST_URI");       // Requested URI
$http_ref = getenv("HTTP_REFERER");         // HTTP Ref­erer
$http_agent = getenv("HTTP_USER_AGENT");    // User Agent
$error_date = date("D M j Y g:i:s a T");     // Error Date
$msg­body =
"There was a 404 error on the ".$server_name." domain".
"nnDetailsn———————————————————————-".
"nWhen: ".$error_date.
"n(Who) IP Address: ".$ip.
"n(What) Tried to Access: http://".$server_name.$request_uri.
"n(From where) HTTP Ref­erer: ".$http_ref.
"nnUser Agent: ".$http_agent;
mail("you@yourdomain.com", "maxbeatty.com 404 report", $msg­body, "From: 404@yourdomain.comn");

include_once ‘header.php’;
?>[/php]

Now every time there is a 404 error in Word­Press, you’ll get an email about it. But wait, do you really want your inbox clut­tered with error emails you may not be able to address until the week­end? No– enter Gmail fil­ters.

In Gmail, go to Set­tings then click on Fil­ters. You want to label any emails from ‘404@yourdomain.com’ as ‘404 Errors’, tell them to skip the inbox, and never be marked spam because odds are the URLs and tech­ni­cal details will look spammy.

Fil­ter mes­sages from ‘404@yourdomain.com’

Skip the inbox, apply the label, and never mark as spam

Then when you have time to look over errors that your site has pro­duced for the day/week/month, they’ll all be wait­ing for your review under the ‘404 Errors’ label in Gmail. From there you can try to recre­ate and diag­nose the problems.

If you’re lazy or scared of edit­ing code, there are Word­Press plu­g­ins our there to do all of this for you and even enhance your bor­ing 404 land­ing page.

• 404 Noti­fier is a plu­gin that will send you emails any­time a 404 error is pro­duced. You might still want to set up a Gmail fil­ter for their emails.
• 404 SEO Plu­gin will “auto­mat­i­cally dis­play links to rel­e­vant pages on your site, based on the words in the URL that was not found.”
• Smart 404 will “per­form a search of your posts, pages, tags and cat­e­gories, using key­words from the requested URL. If there’s a match, redi­rect to that con­tent instead of show­ing the error. If there’s more than one match, the 404 tem­plate can use some tem­plate tags to pro­vide a list of sug­ges­tions to the vis­i­tor.” I think this could be annoy­ing if a user KNOWS what they are look­ing for, but could be help­ful if a user has a typo in the URL.

Hope this quick copy/paste will improve your site and help your users find what they’re look­ing for!