Is Your Website Leaking Visitors?

Your website probably has a leak in it.

Despite your best efforts to make a watertight design that funnels visitors through your content pages to conversion, there’s a place where visitors are finding their way out.

There may be a steady drip of lost traffic leaking through any page that resolves in a 404 Page Not Found Error. And if you’re not careful, that drip can turn into a stream. 

If you look at your site analytics, URLs that resolve in 404 errors (as they are commonly referred to) typically have the highest exit rates of any pages on your site. When visitors arrive there, they don’t usually stay. They move on and your opportunity is missed.

Thankfully, it’s probably the easiest leak to fix in the history of plumbing.

What is a 404 Page Not Found Error?

A 404 or “Not Found” error message occurs when a server cannot find a file that has been requested by a user. In plain English, it means that the page someone was looking for on your website is no longer there.

In their simplest (and most frustrating) form, they look something like this:

It is a frustrating experience for most users, and typically they won’t stick around to figure out where the page they were looking for actually is.

More likely, they’ll leave your site, give up their search, and go back to Google to see if another site has information similar to what they were looking for.

It means that you’ve lost a visitor, a potential loyal reader, or a buyer.

What Causes a 404 Page Not Found Error?

If we’ve done everything right on our website and have been careful about where each link points to, we should be good, right? Not necessarily. Pages resolving to a 404 Error can occur for reasons out of our control. Reasons like:

• Someone could type in the URL of a page on your website incorrectly

• A webmaster on another site could link to your site with an outdated or erroneous URL, or someone could send a friend a botched URL via IM

• A site could be redesigned or recategorized, and not all URLs may be properly redirected to their new URL

• The link structure of your site or an individual page could have been altered, rendering existing links obsolete

What Can Be Done to Reduce Exit Rates on 404 Error Pages?

Regardless of the effort you put in to ensuring each URL on your site resolves to a piece of content, there is still a risk of your visitors stumbling upon your error page. It happens to the best of us.

So, what can we do about it?

Admit the mistake: Nothing annoys readers quite like a condescending error message. Politely (or humorously) inform the reader that the specific page they requested is no longer there.

For example, instead of the commonly seen and undeniably user-unfriendly “PAGE NOT FOUND” text at the top of many error pages, you could say something like “We’re sorry, we can’t seem to find this page. Please be patient with us and try one of these options below.”

Give them options below the error message: Keeping the visitor on your site means helping them find what they were originally looking for. Common elements to help achieve this are:

• A search box.

• A list of high-level category pages (think “mini sitemap”)

• A list of popular or most recent posts

• A tag cloud with the topics of your site clearly displayed

• A simple contact form (with quick response time) so they can contact you easily and directly

By implementing the above suggestions on 10 different websites I’ve worked on, I was able to help reduce the Exit Rate on pages resolving to 404 error pages by anywhere from 15-40% Reducing this percentage means increasing page views on your website.

But optimizing your 404 error page is like patching up the leak. Really, we want to examine the underlying plumbing.

Getting to the Root of the Problem

Aside from optimizing the design, layout, and content of your 404 error page to entice clicks and reduce your exit rate, you can also dig deeper and find out what is truly causing these errors to occur.

Identify the problem: If you’re not already, starting using Google Webmaster Tools on your site. One of the many offerings of this free toolkit is a feature that identifies URLs that have been accessed which resulted in a 404 error page. Keep a list of these URLs and:

Contact webmasters to fix broken inbound links: Though painstaking and highly manual, it’s sometimes worth writing a quick email to the webmaster of a site with a bad link pointing to your site asking them to fix it. Likely, they won’t want a bad outbound link on their site either, and will be willing to comply. If you can’t do that:

Find an alternative page each can point to: Using a 301 redirect, point each erroneous URL to another URL on your site that is either similar, or is actually the corrected original URL.

For example, if you see in Google Webmaster Tools that visitors are attempting to access http://www.example.com/story-about-turles and you happen to know that it should be pointing to http://www.example.com/story-about-turtles ask your webmaster or development team to set up a 301 redirect pointing the error-laden URL to the proper one.

Leaks on your website are inevitable. The question is what will you use to patch it up, and how quickly will you get there?

How do you address 404 error pages on your website?

[image: mavadam]