A Nearly Perfect 404 Error Page in WordPress

In this seemingly infinite Web
Oh! young browser thou slips
In the middle of a thousand trips
Realising what was just
The apparent reality of pages
Is nothing but a veil of certainity
404 alone is the absolute reality
-Arun

So a visitor to your website mistypes a URL, what does he see? A nearly blank page with ‘404 error’ emblazoned over it? At least that was my case until I decided to do something about it.

So many great tutorials have been written on creating a 404 Error page. The best in my opinion is at SacramentoWeb. However, the solution the author has proposed leads the user to a search box already filled with a value by second guessing what the user tried to search for. I was looking for a 404 page that already has those results below the search box.

After some research, I finally hacked up some PHP code. The result can be already seen on my site and looks quite impressive. I mean I was quickly addicted to misusing the feature by performing random searches e.g. for hollywood stuff on my site I would try typing !!!

Here is a quick summary of what to do for any template to display these results:

If you haven’t modified your .htaccess file, then open it and copy paste the following as your first line

ErrorDocument 404 /index.php?error=404

Copy index.php from your template and rename it to 404.php in the same directory
Remove all sections dealing with posts or comments. Roughly the lines between < ?php if ( have_posts() ) and ``
Copy the following line to the first line of 404.php. This is to help search engine spiders indicate that this is an error page.

header(“HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found”);