404 Page on a Static Site

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Chris Coyier on (Updated on )

Here’s a very quick, but very useful trick. You can catch 404 errors (page not found) on a static site and serve up a custom 404 page with a one-liner in your .htaccess file:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

The “/404.php” part is the path to whatever file you want to serve up as the error page.

In other words…

Remember that the .htaccess file works onApache servers only. I say “static” sites, because if you are using a CMS system already (like WordPress), there is already a system in place for catching 404 errors and this is unnecessary.