This article follows up on one written back in January 2024 called ‘Why custom 404 error pages are important for council websites‘. In the previous article I used the combined wisdom from GOV.UK and Google on custom 404s. From their advice I identified ten points which help to make up an effective 404 for people visiting council websites:

1. The page title of the custom 404 is ‘Page not found’
2. ‘Page not found’ is included as an H1 (the main title on a webpage)
3. The page includes a polite but brief explanation to help visitors understand why they have landed on the page
4. Branding and navigation on the custom 404 is the same as other pages on the website
5. The page includes to help visitors find what they are looking for on the website, such as homepage, search and A-Z links
6. The page includes contact information (form or links)
7. Breadcrumbs are not included
8. Technical jargon such as 404 or bad request is not included
9. Informal or humorous words (like oops) are not included
10. Red warning text or red background is not included
    

How was the review carried out?

I decided to investigate how well councils performed against the ten points on custom 404s mentioned above. This was very time consuming, but I think it was a fairer way to assess performance across councils. The work will also hopefully provide councils with a self-help resource to review and improve their own performance.

I have ranked council performance on 404s based on the score out of ten that they achieved:

Perfect: 10
Excellent: 9
Great: 8
Good: 7
Fair: 5 – 6
Poor: 3 – 4

How well do councils perform on custom 404s?

Overall this review suggests that in general councils are doing a reasonable job on custom 404s. 14 councils managed to get a perfect score of ten:

• Amber Valley Borough Council
• Blaby District Council
• Brighton and Hove Council
• Chesterfield Borough Council
• Ealing Council
• East Renfrewshire Council
• East Sussex County Council
• Guildford Borough Council
• Middlesborough Council
• Southampton City Council
• Suffolk County Council
• Tandridge District Council
• Wiltshire Council
• Winchester City Council

Score (0-10)	Performance	Number of councils
10	Perfect	14
9	Excellent	98
8	Great	91
7	Good	67
5-6	Fair	108
3-4	Poor	31

For many council website owners sorting out custom 404s appears to be a task that is done before launching a new website and then is generally forgotten about. I think this is true of all website owners, not just council website owners.

One of my bugbears in this review was finding councils who tried to explain away 404 issues with launching a new website – even though their website was launched a year or more earlier! It isn’t helpful to users and reveals that some councils aren’t periodically reviewing their 404 pages.

For example:

‘We launched a new website in April 2021 and some of the sections have changed names and some old content might be missing.’

‘This is a new website – the page you’re looking for might have been removed or had its name changed.’

‘We’ve moved and you’ve probably got this message because the search engines haven’t caught up with us yet.’

‘We have launched a new site, the page you are looking for may have moved.’   

Which councils need to improve their custom 404s?

189 councils scored 8 to 9 out of ten and 67 scored 7 out of ten. 108 councils scored 7 out of ten. These councils are doing well, but have an opportunity to improve their position with a few tweaks.

31 councils scored 3 to 4 out of ten and they are currently ranked as poor and need to seriously review and improve their performance.

I would suggest that all councils need to get into the habit of periodically reviewing their custom 404s. Those councils scoring 8 to 10 on my review should find this a very quick task, but nevertheless I think it would be time well spent.

Councils scoring 3-7 on my review will have more to consider but it shouldn’t take very long to fix any issues.

Custom 404 error pages on council websites (UK and Ireland) – Research

You can view our research about custom 404 error pages on council websites below. A variety of charts and a search facility can be found on the directory by selecting the Extensions option. Please get in contact if you have any feedback or want to report any updates to the research.