Quick Tip #006—Adding a 404 Not Found Page to your Static Site
A 404: Not Found
page is a pretty standard thing on the web. It’s particularly useful when someone shares a broken or mistyped link. You don’t need dynamic middleware to do this, it’s pretty easy to add to a statically generated site. There are a few options, depending on your web host:
But first let’s make our 404.html
template:
---
title: Oops! Not Found
permalink: 404.html
---
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<title>{{ title }}</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>{{ title }}</h1>
<p>This is where you should tell the user how to find their content. Maybe on the <a href="{{ "/" | url }}">home page?</a></p>
</body>
</html>
Eleventy will output this template to 404.html
.
If you’re using GitHub Pages or Netlify, there is no step two! A 404.html
file in your output directory is all you need.
Netlify even has lovely multi-language 404 page support too using Redirects
.
.htaccess #
For other hosts, if you use .htaccess
for configuration you can use ErrorDocument
. Make sure your root directory matches here!
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
With --serve
#
If you're using eleventy --serve
, you can configure Browsersync to do the 404 routing by passing a callback in your config. Read more on the BrowserSyncConfig option, the Browsersync callbacks option, and how to provide a 404 using a Browsersync callback.
const fs = require("fs");
module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
eleventyConfig.setBrowserSyncConfig({
callbacks: {
ready: function(err, bs) {
bs.addMiddleware("*", (req, res) => {
const content_404 = fs.readFileSync('_site/404.html');
// Add 404 http status code in request header.
res.writeHead(404, { "Content-Type": "text/html; charset=UTF-8" });
// Provides the 404 content without redirect.
res.write(content_404);
res.end();
});
}
}
});
};
Thank you Cassey Lottman.
All Quick Tips
#001
—Inline Minified CSS#002
—Inline Minified JavaScript#003
—Add Edit on GitHub Links to All Pages#004
—Zero Maintenance Tag Pages for your Blog#005
—Super Simple CSS Concatenation#006
—Adding a 404 Not Found Page to your Static Site#007
—Fetch GitHub Stargazers Count (and More) at Build Time#008
—Trigger a Netlify Build Every Day with IFTTT#009
—Cache Data Requests