4.4 Use Error Pages and Redirects Carefully

Navigation errors lead to mistakes, which lead to visitors wasting time trying to resolve them, or abandoning a website altogether. Anything that can be done to interject, predict, and way-find around potential problems will reduce emissions over time.

Criteria

Error Pages: Maintain sites by ensuring links are correct, and if errors occur, provide suitable way-finding within optimized pages for each error type to ensure resources can be identified to help visitors complete the task they started.
Redirection: Redirect websites, subdomains, and pages only when necessary. Proactively seek broken or outdated links and fix them. A redirect or search will often help reduce the number of pages a visitor needs to load.

Impact

Low

Effort

Low

Benefits

Environmental:
While errors and redirects should be avoided, it’s not likely possible. Therefore, having the page’s visitor’s encounter optimized will hopefully reduce their frustration (and thereby their time on screen trying to pick a new route – or worse, giving up).
Transparency:
Problems can occur, having failsafe mechanisms in place prevents the visitor from being blamed, and it gives them a direction to move once they encounter an error.
Accessibility:
Error pages matter, they can help lost individuals find their path, and providing useful navigation and appropriate signage can reduce the loss of abandonment. This can be especially useful for individuals with cognitive impairments who may have reached such a location due to forgetting where a resource was located, being unable to spell the URL correctly, or finding themselves at a dead end due to confusion.
Performance:
Redirects used appropriately can help visitors find a resource that has been moved quickly.
Conversion:
Visitors are less likely to abandon a website if they can find an instant solution.

GRI

materials: Low
energy: Low
water: Low
emissions: Low

Example

Code:
```
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
```
htaccess Error Documents. Apache and NGINX boilerplates are available.

Resources

View the Guideline