404 Page Not Found Errors
Important pages are missing or links lead to "404 — Page Not Found," frustrating visitors and bleeding away the search traffic those pages had earned.
Common signs of this issue
- Clicking a menu item or link shows "404 — Page Not Found."
- Pages that used to work now return 404 — sometimes discovered via an old bookmark or a customer complaint.
- Only certain pages 404 while the homepage is fine — or suddenly every page except the homepage 404s.
- Google results still list pages that now dead-end.
- The 404s started right after a redesign, a migration, or a permalink/settings change.
Safe checks you can do yourself
None of these require sharing passwords with anyone.
- First sort the problem by scope, because the causes differ completely. One page: it was deleted, renamed, or its address changed. A scattered handful: broken links or moved content. Everything except the homepage: a site-wide rewrite/permalink problem — one setting, not many missing pages.
- On WordPress, for the everything-404s case: go to Settings → Permalinks and click Save Changes (no edits needed). This rebuilds the address rules and is safe, reversible, and fixes a remarkable share of site-wide 404s in ten seconds.
- For a single 404: check whether the page still exists in your editor under a different address (renamed or moved), or sits in trash. Restoring or redirecting beats recreating.
- Compare your menu links against the real page addresses — a typo or an old address in the menu produces a permanent-looking 404 that's really just a bad link.
- If 404s followed a migration or redesign, list the old addresses that mattered (Search Console's indexing and 404 reports show exactly which missing pages Google knows about — free and definitive) and redirect each to its closest new equivalent.
- Find broken links you don't know about: a free "broken link checker" crawl of your site lists every internal link that 404s, so you fix from a complete list instead of waiting for complaints.
- Check your 404 page itself: it should offer a search box or links onward. A dead-end 404 loses the visitor; a helpful one often saves them.
What this usually means
A single 404 means that page's address stopped being valid — deleted, renamed, or moved without a redirect. Site-wide 404s (homepage fine, everything else dead) are almost never mass deletion: they're one broken rewrite rule or permalink setting, which is why the ten-second permalink re-save so often fixes them.
A wave of 404s after a redesign or migration means the new site uses different addresses and the old ones weren't redirected. This is the expensive version, because those old addresses held your Google rankings and inbound links — every unredirected one donates its traffic to a dead end. A 301 redirect from each old address to its new equivalent transfers visitors AND most of the accumulated SEO value.
Ordinary 404s from typos and long-dead links are normal internet background noise — Google doesn't punish you for 404s existing. What costs you is 404ing pages that had traffic, links, or rankings, and leaving your own internal links broken.
What not to do
- Don't delete or rename live pages without setting up a redirect at the same moment — the redirect is the part that preserves the page's earned value.
- Don't ignore widespread 404s after site work — every week unredirected, Google reassigns those rankings elsewhere, and recovery gets harder.
- Don't create redirect spaghetti — chains (A→B→C) and loops confuse browsers and dilute SEO value. Redirect old addresses directly to their final destination, once.
- Don't redirect everything to the homepage as a lazy catch-all — visitors seeking a specific page get dumped somewhere generic and leave; Google treats mass homepage redirects as soft 404s anyway.
- Don't recreate a lost page at a new address when the old address could simply be restored or redirected — same content at a new URL starts its SEO from zero.
When to get help
A stray 404 or the permalink re-save you can handle yourself today. The case worth hiring carefully for is the post-migration wave: building a clean map of old addresses to new ones — prioritized by which old pages actually had traffic and links (Search Console shows this) — and implementing the redirects properly. Done well within a few weeks of the move, most search traffic survives; left for months, some of it is simply gone.
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Frequently asked questions
Why do all my pages suddenly 404 except the homepage?
On WordPress that's the classic permalink/rewrite failure — one broken rule, not mass deletion. Settings → Permalinks → Save Changes rebuilds it and usually fixes everything at once. If not, the .htaccess file or a server rule changed, which is a quick fix for a helper.
Do 404 errors hurt my SEO?
404s existing is normal and unpunished. What hurts is 404ing pages that had rankings, links, or traffic without redirecting them — that traffic and authority evaporates — and leaving your own internal links pointing at dead ends.
What is a 301 redirect?
A permanent forwarding instruction: visitors and search engines requesting the old address get sent to the new one automatically, and Google transfers most of the old page's ranking value. It's the standard tool whenever an address changes.
How do I find all my broken links?
Two free sources: a broken-link-checker crawl (finds broken links inside your site) and Google Search Console's 404 report (shows dead pages Google knows about — effectively the outside world's list). Fix from those lists rather than waiting for complaints.
Should old deleted pages be redirected forever?
Redirect any address that had real traffic or inbound links, and keep those redirects indefinitely — they cost nothing. For a page with no traffic and no replacement, a clean 404 (or 410) is honest and fine.
Someone linked to my site with a wrong URL. Can I fix their mistake?
You can't edit their link, but you can catch it: create a redirect from the misspelled address they used to the right page. If a decent site sent that link, catching it is worth the thirty seconds.