A handful of blogs I read have caught news of a site that throws a custom 404 error page that plays on a trendy Internet meme. Their take sees to be that a cute or funny error page can take some of the sting out of running into a dead end – and while I’d agree with that notion, it’s probably not the best way to rescue a lost visitor.
And since there are no figures for the number of users who bail, there are likewise no numbers to substantiate the value of providing a custom 404 error page – in terms of the decrease in percentage of users who bail after providing a custom error page, or using one tactic versus another.
In part, that may be because disclosing the information is embarrassing to the site operator – that 404 errors are thrown at all implies (sometimes rightly) that a problem exists, and the site operator hasn’t been attentive to it.
Another part of the problem is that content management and traffic analysis software tend to sweep these under the rug. I’ve seen at least two packages that purposefully ignore 404 errors when considering the “last page viewed” by a site visitor, and most of them separate error statistics from regular traffic, making it impossible to follow the click-stream of a user who has encountered such an error.
In the absence of any evidence, I expect that a high percentage of users leave a site after encountering a 404 error. While a “funny” error page might make the experience less jarring to the user, I don’t expect that it has a significant effect on that . That there may be tactics that can help to redirect the user to the content they were seeking, and I expect that has some effect in getting the user out of the cul-de-sac while keeping them on site.
But in the end, all of this is just speculation in the absence of evidence: these seem reasonable notions, but there is no proof.
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