How to fix error 404

You click a link, wait a second, and get hit with a blank page and three digits that ruin your day: 404. If you’ve been trying to figure out how to fix error 404, you’re not alone — it’s one of the most common issues website owners and everyday users run into, and the good news is that it’s almost always solvable once you understand what’s actually going on behind the scenes.

What a 404 error actually means (and why it matters)

A 404 status code is a server’s way of saying: “I received your request, I understand it perfectly, but there’s nothing here at this address.” The page doesn’t exist — either it was deleted, moved, or the URL was mistyped. The server itself is working fine. That distinction matters, because it tells you exactly where to look when troubleshooting.

From an SEO perspective, a broken page is more than an inconvenience. Search engines crawl your site, find dead-end URLs, and interpret them as signals of poor maintenance. Accumulated 404 errors can quietly damage your site’s crawl efficiency and user trust over time.

The most common reasons pages go missing

Before jumping into fixes, it helps to know why this happens in the first place. Here are the typical culprits:

• The page was deleted without setting up a redirect
• The URL structure changed after a CMS update or migration
• A typo in an internal or external link points to a non-existent address
• The domain changed and old links weren’t updated
• A plugin or theme update modified permalink structures

Understanding the cause directly shapes which solution makes the most sense. A mistyped URL needs a different fix than a page that was moved during a site migration.

Step-by-step: fixing 404 errors on your website

Let’s walk through the actual process. The approach below works for most website setups, including WordPress-based sites.

Step 1 — Find out which URLs are throwing errors

You can’t fix what you can’t see. Use Google Search Console to pull a list of pages returning 404 responses — go to the Coverage or Pages report and look for “Not found” entries. Alternatively, tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs Site Audit will crawl your site and flag broken URLs with full context.

Step 2 — Decide what to do with each broken URL

Once you have the list, you have a few options depending on the situation:

Step 3 — Set up 301 redirects properly

A 301 redirect is the standard, search-engine-friendly way to tell browsers and crawlers that a page has permanently moved. On WordPress, the simplest way to manage redirects is through a plugin like Redirection or Rank Math’s redirect manager. These tools let you map old URLs to new destinations without touching server configuration files.

If you have access to your server’s .htaccess file (common on Apache hosting), you can also add redirects manually. A basic redirect looks like this:

Redirect 301 /old-page-url https://yourdomain.com/new-page-url

Always test the redirect after setting it up using a tool like httpstatus.io to confirm the server is returning a 301 and not accidentally creating a redirect chain.

Step 4 — Fix permalink issues in WordPress specifically

WordPress users sometimes encounter 404 errors site-wide after updates or migrations — every page suddenly breaks. This is usually a permalink structure issue. The fix is surprisingly simple: go to Settings → Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard and click Save Changes without changing anything. This regenerates the .htaccess rewrite rules and typically resolves the problem instantly.

Step 5 — Create a custom 404 page

Even after cleaning up known broken URLs, some 404s will always exist — mistyped addresses, outdated bookmarks, external links you can’t control. A well-designed custom 404 page turns a dead end into a helpful experience. Include a search bar, links to popular content, and a clear message that guides visitors back into your site rather than sending them to hit the back button.

When you’re the visitor, not the site owner

If you’re hitting a 404 on someone else’s website and need to access that content, you have a few practical options. First, check whether the URL contains a typo — sometimes a missing hyphen or extra character is all it takes. Second, try searching for the page title directly in Google; it may have moved to a different URL that’s already indexed. Third, check the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org — it stores historical snapshots of web pages and might have a cached version of exactly what you were looking for.

Keeping 404 errors from piling up in the future

Fixing existing errors is only half the job. Building habits that prevent new ones from appearing is what keeps your site healthy long-term. A few things that genuinely help:

• Before deleting or renaming any page, set up a redirect first
• Run a monthly crawl with a tool like Screaming Frog to catch broken internal links early
• When migrating a site, prepare a full redirect map before going live
• Monitor Google Search Console’s page indexing report regularly
• Avoid changing URL slugs on published content unless absolutely necessary

The pattern behind most 404 problems is the same: a URL changed or disappeared without anyone updating the references pointing to it. Keeping that principle in mind makes it much easier to catch issues before they become problems.

The difference between a problem and a minor inconvenience

A single 404 error on a large website is barely worth mentioning. Hundreds of them, left unchecked for months, start affecting crawl budget, user experience, and the overall signals your site sends to search engines. The actual work of fixing broken pages rarely takes long once you know where to look and what to do with each case. What takes longer is ignoring it and letting the list grow. A bit of regular maintenance goes further here than any one-time cleanup ever will.