Better 404 page for WordPress.org

[bradparbs]

Migrated from ​#wp23160:

Right now, if you get a 404 on wp.org, there isn't really much.

example: ​http://wordpress.org/howabouta404

I'd suggest at the minimum changing the wording away from 'no posts' to 'no pages', and potentially adding links to commonly accessed areas, such as 'Were you looking for a plugin, theme, blah blah?'

In the side bar, there is also a 'Categories' section, that always displays 'No categories', maybe remove that as well?

---

Current 404 pages:

• ​https://wordpress.org/404/
• ​https://wordpress.org/fooo404/
• ​https://make.wordpress.org/404
• ​https://ru.wordpress.org/404

[Hanni]

Worth nothing that there's something at /404/ which could possibly be utilised or simply vanquished if it is not to be used in fixing this?

[Otto42]

We can make a 404 page look any way we like. Any ideas?

[Hanni]

@melchoyce the wizard is already watching and will have some design ideas, perhaps? I'd love to help with text, if that's needed. Will mull it over.

[Hanni]

So, I included the content at /404/ above because it already includes some of what @bradparbs was suggesting...

Questions: can it be contextual, or perhaps can we make use of the most common things people seem to be looking for when they hit 404s, and list them as such?

Otherwise information on top of what is given the nav is clearly necessary as just effectively reproducing that'd doesn't really give the user much help.

[Otto42]

Yes, our global 404 handler is definitely no longer working correctly. I suspect this happened during the nginx migration. What you see at the /404/ url was supposed to be global for all 404 cases, and it used to work, once.

Right now, it's showing the default 404 for whatever theme is being used instead, depending on what site you hit.

[Otto42]

Replying to Hanni:

Questions: can it be contextual, or perhaps can we make use of the most common things people seem to be looking for when they hit 404s, and list them as such?

Given that the current 404 is generated by the various themes in use on w.org and make, we can put more or less whatever we like in there, based on whatever information is available.

So, basically, yes. If we're not going to reinstate the original global 404 (which wasn't terribly helpful to begin with), then we can have it individualized to specific sites and such without too much trouble.

Ideally, if it makes sense for this to be different for different sites, then I'd probably do something like make a Page-name that each make site can edit to customize their own particular 404 page, with some kind of fallback position if they don't have one. That way we don't have to micromanage the thing via SVN for each site.

[samuelsidler]

George is going to work up something here.

(Some sites are ​worse than others.)

[melchoyce]

Did @georgestephanis ever get a chance to work on this?

[georgestephanis]

Nope

[here]

Please consider returning an http 404 response rather than the current 200. This may warrant a separate ticket.

In looking into " soft 404 " issues on another site, I looked to wordpress.org as an example. However, the current 404 page returns a 200 OK along with it's "404" content.

curl -I ​https://wordpress.org/404/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK

[karmatosed]

404page current

[karmatosed]

The above is what is showing now for the page. It seems some work has been done. Anything else people would like to see on this?

[boemedia]

I think we could make more use of the 404-page and give users some guidance/suggestions where they can go.
Maybe we can get some inspiration from here: ​https://uxplanet.org/10-great-examples-of-404-error-pages-6dff84eea87d
Replying to bradparbs:

I'd suggest potentially adding links to commonly accessed areas, such as 'Were you looking for a plugin, theme, blah blah?'

[ibdz]

In today's ​Design triage, we agreed to stick with the current 404 page.

[ben.greeley]

Since this ticket is quite old and the 404 page has made a few iterations since the original request, I'd like to suggest we close this.

The newest version of the 404 page that is being rolled out with the redesign project seems to contain a number of the suggestions made in this thread.

The new 404 page can be found at ​https://wordpress.org/showcase/dkdkd

Scerenshot: ​https://d.pr/i/rITsks