How to Change the Site’s Default 404 Error Not Found Page

The apache’s default “404 Error not found” page seems ugly. And may some hosting service put theire ads in it. We can add some entry in .htaccess to change the defualt 404 error page. This method can also be used for some other error codes. A list of the server returned codes can be found in Table 1.

It simply need to add the “ErrorDocument” command to the .htaccess file. The format is:

ErrorDocument code /dir/file.ext

or

ErrorDocument code http://mydomain.name/dir/file.ext

For example:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

would cause any error code resulting in 404 to be forwarded to mydomain.name/404.html

ErrorDocument 404 https://www.systutorials.com/p/404.html

would cause any error code resulting in 404 to be forwarded to https://www.systutorials.com/p/404.html

For other error code such as 401 the method is the same. But not all the returned code should be forwarded. Most of the time, forwarding the error codes is enough.

Table1: Server returned codes

Successful Client Requests
200 OK
201 Created
202 Accepted
203 Non-Authorative Information
204 No Content
205 Reset Content
206 Partial Content
Client Request Redirected
300 Multiple Choices
301 Moved Permanently
302 Moved Temporarily
303 See Other
304 Not Modified
305 Use Proxy
Client Request Errors
400 Bad Request
401 Authorization Required
402 Payment Required (not used yet)
403 Forbidden
404 Not Found
405 Method Not Allowed
406 Not Acceptable (encoding)
407 Proxy Authentication Required
408 Request Timed Out
409 Conflicting Request
410 Gone
411 Content Length Required
412 Precondition Failed
413 Request Entity Too Long
414 Request URI Too Long
415 Unsupported Media Type
Server Errors
500 Internal Server Error
501 Not Implemented
502 Bad Gateway
503 Service Unavailable
504 Gateway Timeout
505 HTTP Version Not Supported

Eric Ma

Eric is a systems guy. Eric is interested in building high-performance and scalable distributed systems and related technologies. The views or opinions expressed here are solely Eric's own and do not necessarily represent those of any third parties.

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