Of all the HTTP errors you can expect to find while browsing the Internet, the 404 is by far the most common. It describes a page that can’t be found or delivered by the server, and it can be caused by one of many reasons.
If you’re using somebody else’s website, you can follow a few simple steps to try and fix the 404 error. The first is simply to refresh the page. It makes no sense whatsoever, but sometimes a quick refresh will skip you straight to the content you were looking for.
Failing this, a little common sense should be applied to determine whether the URL is correct. Now, of course, we can’t say for sure what the webmaster intended to a name a page. But if you’re trying to access MyPagr.html, it’s likely that you’ll have a lot more success by manually amending the URL to MyPage.html. Spelling mistakes in links are common and while they can be a pain to troubleshoot for novice users, a little investigation should reveal whether this is the cause of the 404 error.
If you’re still receiving 404 errors galore, you can try hopping up a directory and accessing the page from its natural hierarchy position in the site. For example if you receive an error at:
www.mypages.com/somepages/page.html
Try accessing:
www.mypages.com/somepages/
A lot of the time, this new link will take you to a page where the content is accessible through a newer and working link. Alternatively, you might receive a directory listing by accessing the folder in this way. Scan the contents of the directory and see if there’s a file that matches the one that you’re looking for.
Perhaps even more common than misspellings, you’ll notice that some 404 errors aren’t caused by a typo, but by a change in the file extension. MyPage.html is seen as a completely different location on the web server to MyPage.php. Try to access the content of the HTML file using the PHP extension and you’ll get a 404 error – assuming that there isn’t a PHP page in place on the server already.
In most cases, the content itself hasn’t been deleted. The fact that it can no longer be found and throws up a 404 error is irrelevant. It’s simply been moved to a different point on the website and the hyperlink hasn’t been updated. Updating links can be a chore on a large website, and it’s easy for some URLs to get lost in the mix. You can try accessing the page from a different point on the website, or go back to the homepage and run a search if the website offers it.
You should also pay special attention to the case of the file name. By this, we mean that upper case and lower case can be treated as different letters on some servers. Case sensitivity means that MyPage.php could be seen as different to mypage.php, even though the letters are exactly the same! Be sure that you aren’t skipping over this important functionality of many web servers before giving in to the 404 error.
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