How to Increase Traffic by Means of Recovering Your Lost Visitors: User Friendly Error Pages
If you are reading this, you probably are either a keen internet user or a person interested in increasing traffic by all means. Website ranking by search engines greatly depends on its traffic. One of the ways to increase it is to make your previously lost visitors come back to your website. Or, you can prevent the loss of visitors by providing both excellent content and smart communication with the visitors to your website.
One of the most annoying things about surfing the Internet is a great number of error messages. Today, we would like to present you a few ways how to overcome this problem. Error messages may be caused by various reasons, such as outdated links, misspellings, or internal server errors. When there is an error, the server automatically displays specific generic error pages depending on the type of error. These error pages are extremely frustrating for potential visitors.
Just think of the moments when you encountered those irritating SERVER ERROR or ERROR 404 pages. What are the chances that a potential visitor will return to your site after he/she simply mistypes the website address or clicks on an outdated link? The chances are next to zero, believe us. But there is one way how to recover your lost visitors – you will only have to take some time and customize your error pages making them user friendly.
How to create a user friendly error page?
- Make sure your error page works with different types of software
- Before you begin editing your server files, make a backup copy of every file you are going to change, since even the slightest typographical mistake is sure to make a mess of the website.
- We suggest creating error pages in standard HTML.
- Avoid writing the word “ERROR” in large bold type – it can only alarm the visitors to your website – the thing you’d better avoid. Instead, encourage your visitors to follow the navigational links to find additional information and resources. Doing this you show that you respect and care of your clients.
- Make sure your error page looks like the other pages of your site with good navigational links and a detailed description of the error a visitor has encountered. Let them understand that the error was not their fault – this is likely to hold the visitors to the website too.
- Having created an error page, save it as an error page: like 404.html, or 400.html. Then create a new folder called “errordocs” where you will be able to store your HTML files.
- Consider making your error pages look creative and unusual, like this.
Now, when your visitors click on an outdated link they will see an informative custom error page. Customizing error pages may take your time, but its potential for recovering lost visitors and increasing traffic is enormous.
