How to Fix 404 Errors on Your Business Website

A 404 error means a visitor clicked a link or typed a URL and your server had nothing to show them. Instead of your product page, your pricing table, or your review collection form, they got a dead end. For businesses that depend on their website to generate leads, collect reviews, and build trust, every 404 is a small crack in the foundation.

The fix is usually straightforward once you know where to look. This guide walks through what causes 404 errors, how to find them on your site, and how to fix each type without breaking anything else.

What a 404 Error Actually Means

HTTP status codes are how web servers talk to browsers. A 200 means everything worked. A 301 means the page moved permanently. A 404 means the server understood the request but couldn't find the page.

From a visitor's perspective, they clicked something and hit a wall. From your server's perspective, someone asked for a file that doesn't exist at that address.

This happens more often than most business owners realize. A study by Ahrefs found that 66.5% of links to websites on the internet are completely dead. Your site isn't immune to that trend.

Why 404 Errors Hurt Your Business

A single 404 won't tank your business. But a pattern of them creates real problems across three areas.

Lost Customers

When a potential customer clicks your Google listing, an ad, or a link from another site and lands on a 404, they're gone. They won't hunt for the right page. They'll hit the back button and click on your competitor's link instead. If that dead link was your Google review page or your contact form, you just lost both the lead and the review.

Search Ranking Damage

Google crawls your site regularly. When Googlebot hits repeated 404s, it signals that the site isn't well-maintained. While Google has said that 404s themselves aren't a direct ranking penalty, they do waste your crawl budget. If Googlebot spends half its time hitting dead pages, it has less budget to discover and index the pages that actually matter for your rankings.

More importantly, external sites that linked to your pages — valuable backlinks that took months or years to earn — are now pointing to nothing. That link equity evaporates with every 404.

Reputation Damage

Your website is part of your brand. A visitor who encounters a dead page forms an instant opinion: this business doesn't keep things up to date. For service businesses where trust is the sale — dentists, lawyers, financial advisors, consultants — a broken website undercuts the credibility you've worked to build through reviews and testimonials.

Common Causes of 404 Errors

Before you can fix 404s, you need to understand what creates them. Here are the most common causes.

Changed or Deleted Pages

This is the number one cause. Someone redesigned the site and the old URLs didn't carry over. Maybe you switched from /services/teeth-whitening to /dental-services/whitening without setting up a redirect. The old URL now returns a 404, and every external link pointing to it is broken.

Typos in Internal Links

A developer or content editor typed /about-su instead of /about-us in a navigation menu or blog post. The link looks right at first glance but points to a page that doesn't exist.

Broken External Links

Other websites, directories, and social media profiles link to your site. If those links were entered with a typo, or if you've changed your URL structure since they were published, those inbound visitors hit 404s. You can't control what other sites link to, but you can redirect those URLs to the right destination.

Deleted Products or Services

If you discontinued a product or stopped offering a service and deleted the page without redirecting it, anyone who bookmarked it, shared it, or found it in search results will get a 404.

CMS or Platform Migration

Switching from WordPress to Shopify, or from Squarespace to a custom site, almost always changes URL structures. Without a redirect map, every old URL becomes a 404 overnight.

How to Find 404 Errors on Your Site

You can't fix what you can't see. Here are four ways to identify 404s.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is free and shows you exactly which pages Googlebot tried to crawl and got a 404. Log in, go to Pages in the left sidebar, and filter by "Not found (404)." Google also reports soft 404s — pages that return a 200 status code but display error content.

This is the single most important tool because it shows you what Google actually experiences when crawling your site, not what you think it experiences.

Site Crawl Tools

Tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs Site Audit, or Sitebulb crawl your entire site the way a search engine would and report every 404 they find. Screaming Frog's free version handles up to 500 URLs, which is enough for most small business sites.

Run a crawl monthly. It takes five minutes to set up and catches problems before they compound.

Server Logs

Your web hosting provider logs every request to your server, including the ones that return 404. If you have access to your server logs (usually through cPanel, Plesk, or your hosting dashboard), filter for 404 status codes to see what visitors and bots are requesting that doesn't exist.

Manual Testing

Click through every page on your site. Click every navigation link, every button, every link in your footer. Open your site on your phone. This sounds tedious, and it is, but it catches things automated tools miss — like JavaScript-generated links that don't appear in static crawls.

How to Fix Each Type of 404 Error

Once you've identified your 404s, here's how to handle each one.

Set Up 301 Redirects

A 301 redirect tells browsers and search engines that a page permanently moved to a new address. This is the right fix when the content still exists somewhere on your site, just at a different URL.

If you moved /services/review-management to /features, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. Every visitor and every search engine bot that hits the old URL gets sent to the new page automatically. The backlink equity transfers too.

How you set up redirects depends on your platform:

WordPress: Use the Redirection plugin. Install it, go to Tools > Redirection, and add your old URL and new URL.
Shopify: Go to Settings > Navigation > URL Redirects and add each redirect.
Next.js: Add entries to your next.config.js redirects array or your middleware.
Apache (.htaccess): Add Redirect 301 /old-path /new-path to your .htaccess file.
Nginx: Add rewrite ^/old-path$ /new-path permanent; to your server block.

Fix Typos in Internal Links

For internal link typos, correct the link at the source. Search your site's code or CMS for the broken URL and update it to the correct one. No redirect needed — just fix the link.

Restore Deleted Content

If you deleted a page that was getting traffic or had inbound links, consider bringing it back. Check the Wayback Machine at archive.org for a cached version of the content if you don't have a backup.

If the content is genuinely outdated and shouldn't come back, redirect the URL to the closest relevant page on your current site.

Build a Useful 404 Page

Even after fixing every known 404, new ones will appear. Visitors will mistype URLs. External sites will link incorrectly. Your 404 page should help visitors find what they're looking for instead of just showing an error message.

A good 404 page includes a clear message that the page wasn't found, a search bar so visitors can look for what they wanted, links to your most popular or important pages, and your site's navigation so they can browse to the right section.

Skip the jokes. A visitor who just hit a dead end doesn't want to read a clever pun. They want to get where they were going.

Preventing Future 404 Errors

Fixing existing 404s is half the battle. Preventing new ones is the other half.

Create a Redirect Map During Site Changes

Before any site migration, redesign, or URL structure change, export a complete list of your current URLs. Map each one to its new equivalent. Implement all redirects before the new site goes live, not after.

Keep a URL Change Log

Anytime you change a URL on your site, log it. Note the old URL, the new URL, and the date. This makes troubleshooting much easier six months later when someone reports a broken link.

Monitor Search Console Monthly

Set a calendar reminder to check Google Search Console's coverage report once a month. New 404s will appear — that's normal. Catching them within a week or two limits the damage.

Audit External Links

Use Ahrefs, Moz, or Google Search Console's Links report to see which external sites link to you and what URLs they're linking to. If you spot links pointing to pages you've moved, set up redirects for those specific URLs.

Don't Delete Pages Without a Plan

Before removing any page from your site, check its traffic in Google Analytics, its backlink profile in Search Console, and whether any internal pages link to it. If it has traffic or links, redirect it. If it has neither, you can safely remove it.

How 404 Errors Affect Your Review Pages

For businesses using online reviews to build trust and attract customers, 404 errors on review-related pages are especially damaging.

If your Google review link sends customers to a 404, they won't leave a review. Period. They tried, they hit a wall, and they moved on. You don't just lose one review — you lose the social proof that review would have generated for every future visitor.

Similarly, if your testimonial page, case studies, or review collection widget lives at a URL that returns a 404, all the trust signals you've built are invisible. Internal links pointing to those pages from your blog or service pages lead nowhere.

Praising's review management platform helps prevent this by giving you stable, permanent links for review collection that don't change when you redesign your site. The review widget embeds directly on your pages rather than relying on a separate URL that could break during a migration.

Quick Reference: 404 Fix Checklist

Run a Google Search Console check for 404s under the Pages report
Run a crawl with Screaming Frog or Ahrefs Site Audit
Categorize each 404: moved page, deleted page, typo, or external link
Set up 301 redirects for moved and deleted pages
Fix typos in internal links at the source
Build a helpful 404 page with search and navigation
Create a redirect map before your next site change
Check Search Console monthly for new 404s

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a 404 error and why does it happen on my business website?

A 404 error means a visitor tried to reach a page on your site that doesn't exist at that URL. The most common causes are pages that were moved or deleted without a redirect, typos in links, and URL changes from a site redesign or platform migration. Every website gets 404 errors eventually. The problem isn't that they happen — it's leaving them unfixed. Each broken page is a missed customer interaction, a wasted backlink, and a signal to search engines that your site isn't well-maintained.

How do 404 errors affect my Google search rankings?

Google has said that 404 errors aren't a direct ranking penalty. However, they do waste your crawl budget — the number of pages Google will crawl on your site in a given period. If a significant portion of your URLs return 404, Googlebot spends time on dead pages instead of indexing the ones that matter. More damaging is the loss of backlink equity. When an external site links to a page that returns 404, the ranking value of that link is lost. Setting up a 301 redirect preserves most of that equity and passes it to the new destination page.

What is the difference between a 404 error and a soft 404?

A standard 404 returns an HTTP 404 status code, telling browsers and search engines the page doesn't exist. A soft 404 returns a 200 status code (which means "success") but the actual page content is an error message or a mostly empty page. Google treats soft 404s as a bigger problem because they send mixed signals. The status code says the page is fine, but the content says otherwise. Check for soft 404s in Google Search Console under the Pages report. Fix them by either restoring real content to the URL or returning a proper 404 status code.

How often should I check my business website for 404 errors?

Monthly is a good baseline for most business websites. Check Google Search Console's Pages report and run a site crawl tool like Screaming Frog. If you're making frequent changes to your site — adding pages, updating URLs, publishing blog posts — check every two weeks. After a major site redesign or platform migration, check daily for the first week and weekly for the first month. New 404s surface quickly when crawlers re-index your changed site structure.

Can I just delete a page without creating a redirect?

You can, but you should only do it if the page has zero traffic and zero backlinks. Check Google Analytics for the page's traffic over the past 12 months, check Google Search Console's Links report for external sites linking to it, and check your internal links to make sure no other page on your site points to it. If the page has any traffic, backlinks, or internal links, set up a 301 redirect to the most relevant existing page on your site. The redirect preserves the link equity and sends visitors somewhere useful instead of a dead end.

For related reading, see our guides on how to get a Google review link, Google Business Profile setup, and review management tools.