As a website owner, it is of high importance for you to provide the best possible experience to the website viewers in order to keep them engaged and enjoy the content. Even if your website content is interesting, helpful and has been presented beautifully, the browser’s default error pages if displayed to the viewers are sure to turn them off, they might actually leave your website all together with the impression of an incomplete website. Well, you surely don’t want to risk your website’s reputation and lose your viewers because of this.
To avoid such situations, web hosts provide a facility called custom error pages to all website owners. These error pages can be coded to look just like your regular web pages, but your viewers will be conveyed that an error has occurred on your website in a nice user-friendly manner. On these custom error pages, you can provide them with a well-written descriptive message about the error that has occurred along with the optional steps stating how to resolve these errors or to get help from the system admin at the provided email address. You can even provide them with interesting links to the other parts of your website in order to keep them engaged.
In this article, we cover the steps to create such error pages for the iPage users. iPage is the cheapest and one of the leading hosting providers of today’s market. iPage uptime is 99%, which is incredible for the fee they charge. All this makes it one of the best solutions available today for website hosting. iPage have made it extremely simple to create custom error pages for its users. It is all a matter of a few clicks and file uploads and you are done. Following we cover the detailed steps to create such error pages on iPage.
[Step 1: Create your error code pages]
First and foremost step is to create the error pages for different set of HTTP error codes. The most important error codes that should be taken care of are 404 (Not Found), 500 (Internal Server Error), 400 (Bad Request). You should always create error pages for at least these three error codes.
There is an option for you to create multiple error pages for the same error code but for different directories. This feature is useful if you have multiple websites being hosted or in a scenario where you have multiple sections of the same website but which is targeting different set of users. For eg. Frontend Site and Backend Control Panel for a same website.
You can also create just one error page and point all the occurring errors throughout your entire website to this very page. However, this is not a very good approach and should be avoided.
Once your error pages are ready, you can upload these pages to your website using FTP client like Filezilla.
[Step 2: Pointing errors to these error pages]
Login to you iPage Control Panel, and locate .htaccess Editor section. Click on .htaccess Editor, you will be presented with a GUI that is generated according to your website’s .htaccess configuration file. Locate Custom Error Pages section and click on it. In this section, you can easily set your custom error handler pages. You will now be presented with a form to set the pointer for the HTTP error code to our custom error file.
[Steps to follow]
- You can choose to either set error pages for a particular directory or for all directories at the root level.
- Once the preferred directory is selected, you can then choose the status code (from the dropdown) for which you want to set this error page pointer.
- The last step is to provide the path of the uploaded error page which should be displayed once the selected error occurs (step 2) for the selected directory (step 1).
This is it, you can create error pages for all types of HTTP errors to give your website a professional feel and properly take care of error situations on your website.