As the owner of Dr. Link Check, a broken link checker app, I have a love-hate relationship with 404 pages. On the one hand, I do everything I can to help our customers find and fix broken links and keep website visitors from running into 404 errors. On the other hand, I truly enjoy a unique and creative 404 page that sets a positive tone and lightens the mood.
While there are still too many websites that use the plain and dull default pages that come with their web servers, some custom 404 pages are gorgeous masterpieces. These hidden error pages are often the places where web designers can show their creativity and express themselves outside the bounds of what was specified by corporate.
For this article, I modified our crawler to search the web for the most beautiful 404 pages. The crawler went through a total of 500,000 websites, reducing the number of candidates to a few thousand, which I then manually narrowed down to the 40 pages presented below.
I hope these designs will give you the inspiration you’ll need to create your own distinctive 404 page. Crafting a pretty error page will not only be fun, but also makes sense from a customer conversion point of view. An appealing 404 page design can take away some of the bitterness of the broken link that a user just encountered. There’s a good chance the user will be pleasantly surprised and stay on your site rather than immediately hitting the back button and never visiting you again.
Now, enough with the chit-chat and on to why you’re actually here: the 404 pages.
Compiling this list of 404 pages was a fun thing for me to do. I hope you enjoyed the article and found some inspiration for your own website projects. If you already have a unique 404 page that you’re proud of, or have designed one based on this article, please message me via Twitter @wulfsoft and tell me about it. I’d love to see your creations.
