How to Change the Site’s Default 404 Error Not Found Page

The apache’s default “404 Error not found” page seems ugly. And may some hosting service put theire ads in it. We can add some entry in .htaccess to change the defualt 404 error page. This method can also be used for some other error codes. A list of the server returned codes can be found in Table 1.

It simply need to add the “ErrorDocument” command to the .htaccess file. The format is:

ErrorDocument code /dir/file.ext

or

ErrorDocument code http://mydomain.name/dir/file.ext

For example:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

would cause any error code resulting in 404 to be forwarded to mydomain.name/404.html

ErrorDocument 404 https://www.systutorials.com/p/404.html

would cause any error code resulting in 404 to be forwarded to https://www.systutorials.com/p/404.html

For other error code such as 401 the method is the same. But not all the returned code should be forwarded. Most of the time, forwarding the error codes is enough.

Table1: Server returned codes

Successful Client Requests
200	OK
201	Created
202	Accepted
203	Non-Authorative Information
204	No Content
205	Reset Content
206	Partial Content
Client Request Redirected
300	Multiple Choices
301	Moved Permanently
302	Moved Temporarily
303	See Other
304	Not Modified
305	Use Proxy
Client Request Errors
400	Bad Request
401	Authorization Required
402	Payment Required (not used yet)
403	Forbidden
404	Not Found
405	Method Not Allowed
406	Not Acceptable (encoding)
407	Proxy Authentication Required
408	Request Timed Out
409	Conflicting Request
410	Gone
411	Content Length Required
412	Precondition Failed
413	Request Entity Too Long
414	Request URI Too Long
415	Unsupported Media Type
Server Errors
500	Internal Server Error
501	Not Implemented
502	Bad Gateway
503	Service Unavailable
504	Gateway Timeout
505	HTTP Version Not Supported