Do you know that you can see a report of URLs on your site that have been visited but don't exist? This might happen for a number of reasons that you might not know about unless someone told you. For example, this might happen because:
- there used to be a page at that URL, but it no longer exists, and there is no redirect
- the URL of the intended page changed, without there being a redirect
- another site, possibly beyond your control, is linking incorrectly to your site
- the URL was pasted somewhere that automatically turned it into a link, but appended additional characters (for example, mentioning a URL inside of brackets will often create a link that includes the final bracket)
- there was a typo in an advertisement or book
- the wrong URL was read out in a speech or a radio ad
- the right URL was read out, but some people assumed a different spelling
- some people are guessing URLs in an attempt to find content, under the assumption that it might use similar patterns as elsewhere
- you hired a skywriter to write out your URL, and the wind blew away some of the end
In WCMS 3, users with the site owner role have access to the "fix 404 pages" tool, which is linked by default from the site management menu in the dashboard. (This actually existed in WCMS 2 at one point, but unfortunately it relied on functionality that caused site slowness and had to be removed; the WCMS 3 version does not have this same dependency.)
In this tool, you will see the paths that have recently resulted in a 404 error. (The system stores the most recent 10,000 entries.) By default, they are sorted by the number of times access has been attempted, though you can click on the other headings to sort by those columns instead.
For any records that seem reasonable and have a relatively high count, you should consider "fixing" these URLs by adding a redirect to a reasonable page, or perhaps by creating content at the URL.
For example, for the URLs in the screenshot, it probably makes sense to redirect "old-page-name" to the new page, and to redirect "news)" to "news". For "guessed-url", that might be an indication that people are looking for content that you do not have, so it may make more sense to create that content than redirect somewhere that isn't relevant. On the other hand, "aaa9" does not seem like a reasonable URL and can likely be safely ignored.
How did you like this tip? Is this something you are already doing, or maybe something you will look to adapt? Are you inspired with suggestions for future tips? Send us feedback!