How to Fix 404 Not Found Errors

By ErrorFix · Updated October 13, 2026 · 6 min read

What the 404 Not Found error means

HTTP status 404 means "not found." Your browser reached the website successfully, but the server has no page at the exact address you requested. It is the web's most famous error — the digital equivalent of knocking on a door where the house has been torn down. Typical causes are a mistyped URL, a page that was renamed or deleted, or an old link pointing somewhere that no longer exists.

A few 404s are harmless, but a site full of them hurts everyone: visitors bounce, and search engines gradually drop the dead pages from their index, taking the site's rankings with them. That is why this guide covers both sides — what to do when you hit a 404 as a visitor, and how to clean them up as a site owner.

Common causes

• Typos in the URL: a single wrong character — a missing letter, an extra slash — points at an address that was never real.
• Deleted or renamed pages: the content was removed or its slug changed, but old links and bookmarks still point at the old address.
• Broken internal links: the site links to a page that no longer exists, often after a redesign or content cleanup.
• Changed permalink or site structure: a CMS settings change (like a new WordPress permalink format) invalidates every old URL at once.
• Moved or expired domains and files: images, PDFs, and downloads hosted at old paths return 404 after a migration or hosting change.

How to fix the 404 Not Found error — step by step

Steps 1 and 2 are for visitors. Steps 3 through 5 are for site owners cleaning up 404s across a site.

1. Check the URL for typos. Read the address bar character by character. Common mistakes include missing or doubled letters, a wrong file extension (.htm vs .html), an extra trailing slash, or spaces that got encoded as %20. Retype the address manually rather than trusting a copied link, and watch for link shorteners or email clients that truncated a long URL. If you followed a link from another site, the link itself may simply be wrong.
2. Use the site's search or go to the homepage. Delete everything after the domain name and press Enter to reach the homepage, then use the site's own search box or navigation menu to find the content — it may have moved to a new address. Many sites also have a sitemap page listing everything they publish. If the page is gone for good, try the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org: paste the URL there to see archived copies of the page and recover its content or its new location.
3. Site owner: set up 301 redirects. Every deleted or renamed page that gets traffic or has backlinks should redirect to its replacement. In WordPress, install the Redirection plugin, go to Tools, then Redirection, and add the old path and the new URL with a 301 (permanent) redirect. On plain hosting, add rules to .htaccess, for example: Redirect 301 /old-page.html https://example.com/new-page.html. A 301 passes most of the old page's search ranking to the new one, while a 404 lets it evaporate.
4. Site owner: find and fix broken internal links. Crawl your site to find every internal link that 404s. Free options include Screaming Frog SEO Spider (crawl up to 500 URLs free) or the Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress. Google Search Console also lists them under Pages (look for "Not found (404)"). Fix each one: point it at the correct current URL, or remove the link if the target is gone for good. Prioritize links in your navigation, homepage, and most-visited articles.
5. Site owner: restore deleted pages or build a helpful 404 page. If a page was deleted by accident, restore it from a backup (your host's backup tool or a plugin like UpdraftPlus) or republish it under the same URL. For 404s you cannot avoid, design a custom 404 page that helps instead of dead-ending: include a search box, links to popular content, and a clear path back to the homepage. In WordPress, customize the 404 template under Appearance, then Theme File Editor, then 404.php, or use your theme's built-in 404 settings.

Did this fix it? Quick checklist

• The correct page loads at the right address
• Old URLs redirect to their replacements with 301s
• No broken internal links remain on key pages
• Deleted pages are restored or intentionally redirected

If you are a visitor and the whole site returns 404s on pages that worked yesterday, the site may be mid-migration — check back in a few hours. If you are an owner and every page on a WordPress site suddenly 404s at once, the permalink settings are the likely culprit: go to Settings, then Permalinks, and click Save Changes (without changing anything) to regenerate the rewrite rules.