Hey Everyone. Scott Austin here.

And in this episode, I'm going to talk about a small but important page in your store. And that's the 404 page. Every theme in Shopify comes with a template for the 404 page. And my recommendation is you just spend a couple of minutes customizing it for your store.

Now, a 404 is a error message, or the server code that comes back from Shopify. When a page is not found. So if someone types in a URL that doesn't exist on your website, they'll see the 404 page. Or if you had a product or a collection that used to exist, and there's a link to it. But now that collection or product no longer exists in your store, they'll also get that 404 page. So updating your 404 page is an important part of your SEO continuity, and making sure that your links don't break.

Now you can't actually in Shopify Analytics see your 404 page views easily. You can if you query the database on the back end. But there's an easy way to go. Look at your 400 fours and that is in your Google search Console. So if you open up Google Search Console and go to pages under the why pages are an index section, you'll see a not found 404 is the reason. You can click on that and you'll see the pages that are generating 400 and fours on your website, so you can easily see which pages are no longer available. Or a lot of times what actually happens is customers type in something wrong or there's a link that is mistyped. So fixing these is good for your SEO continuity and your user experience continuity.

And what you want to do is create redirects for any of your 400 and fours. So you can go into the Shopify admin under Content and menus. There's a link in the upper right called URL redirects. And here you can create a redirect for any page. It's generating a 404. say you want to create a new URL redirect. You'll put in the path like four slash pages Forbes last test. And then you'll decide what to redirect it to. And there you get to make a little bit of a decision on what page you want to redirect your, you know, missing page to. A lot of times, for example, what we do when a product is no longer in the store will redirect it to the main collection that product existed in. So we don't just redirect everything to the home page, we try to figure out the best page that is like the page they were trying to get to. And then redirect to that. Now if there's a mis typing or something like that, it's easy to just redirect it to the proper URL for that page.

So you want to look at your 400 force, create these redirects. And by the way these are called 301 redirects which is a permanent redirect which is an SEO best practice. And that's automatically happening by Shopify when you create URL redirects. and that's a good, best practice that you're going to run on a regular basis for our clients. We we will run that at least once a month just to clean up any extraneous four or fours that are happening.

But then you can also edit your 404 page for a better customer experience by default, your 404 page in most of the templates in Shopify is a very bland page. You know, I brought this one up from rugs USA and I just typed in pages for slash testing to get a 404, and I get a very simple no page found. Sorry, this page cannot be displayed. And there's a home and a bestsellers button. So this is what most themes have by default. And you can see here in Beard brands same thing. They get a page not found and a continue browsing or search our store. Experience.

You can up that a little bit to improve your brand and also provide a better customer experience for your store. Now here in Kylie Cosmetics. Therefore. Oh, poor page. They put in a banner. message says sorry, the page you're looking for does not exist. And then they've got a link back to the shop.

Now, what I like is when you do a little bit better merchandizing than that. Now Gymshark went a direction that I didn't like in that therefore hundred and four page. You know, I never seen this before. The store has no header besides the Gymshark logo and no footer. So all those links are missing, And all it says is 404. Not sure what happened there. Maybe grab a new fit instead. And then we go to the gym. Right. Which is good on brand messaging for Gymshark. And then they take you back to home and they got a nice little image with a broken weight. You know, because this is a broken, page. But there's only one link and that's back to the homepage. So they get this very stark experience, and then they have to start their shopping experience all over again from the homepage.

Now, what Healing Home Foods does is they do a little bit of merchandizing. So they got the normal page not found message. And then they have a shop our family favorites, and they show their four family favorite products to engage people into a shopping experience. And unlike Gymshark, the whole header and footer is here. Now chubby shorts does the same thing and a little bit more, right? They have, page not found. What are you going to do about it? Which is on brand for their kind of snarky messaging. And then they, you know, you may also like they show you a whole list of their favorites and you can scroll through and see lots of them.

Now, the way this is all done is every theme in the Shopify ecosystem has a page template for 404. So you can open up theme customization and go ahead and edit that page. And it's a sections anywhere a page you can add any content like you can for any page or any product or any collection to your 404 page. So you can make that, you know, as rich and as engaging as you want to.

Now, if we go to Deathwish Coffee, can see these guys really spend a little bit of time on their 404 page. They actually have their own 404 image, which is totally on brand. And then they say empty mug. This page is empty to refill your cup by shopping the links below. And they show navigation links for their top collection items or top navigation items. And then below that they show a list of their bestsellers.

So this is, you know, more work than I would recommend most brands do. What I recommend is you just do, the simple little 404 page that Healing Home Foods has in that, you know, engage people into your shopping experience, you know, showing your bestsellers or your favorites and get people understanding. Like, for example, people are going to come to this page from an external link, most likely. Right? And if you just drop them on a blank page, that's telling them nothing about what you sell and shows no products, it's a jarring experience. Like, what was this? The site I was looking for? What do they sell? So by showing some of your products and your best selling products up there, you get a little more context for customers. So they can understand what it is that you're providing and say, oh yeah, I'm in the right place. I do want to continue my shopping experience. Let me click on one of these products or one of the links in the navigation and resume my shopping experience. Because I have the context to know that I'm in the right place.

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So I highly recommend that you go ahead and just add, you know, a simple little merchandizing element that shows products on your 404 page and here and healing Home Foods, you can see I'm now in their Shopify admin under Theme Customization, and I've selected the template for 404 page. This is on the bottom of the list of templates. And here I have the ability to add sections in. And I added the featured collections section in and selected. The are family's favorite collection in there you can also add other sections for you know, a banner if you want a rich banner or, you know, merchandizing. Anything that you want to merchandise in there. But I wouldn't invest too much time in your 404 page.

As you remember back in, we were talking about the redirects and the 301 redirects. Your real goal is to make sure that nobody sees your 404 page by creating redirects and monitoring your 400 and fours, but you do want to have a little bit of a nice experience when people do find a 404. But that should be the exception for your user experience, where the 301 redirect should be the the main way that people engage with missing links.

All right, that's it for this episode or a nice quick one. And that's because I don't want you to spend too much time on your 404 page, but it is one of those little things in your customer experience that is important to spend just a couple minutes on. Set it up once, and then you'll have to think about it again. All right.

Thanks for listening.