Creating Custom 404 Error Pages on Zeit Now v2 Platform

A custom 404 page has become a hallmark of well-polished websites. It allows expressing the creative brand of the site. Sometimes it shows a neat trick and easter eggs.

404 Page Basics

Take dev.to 404 page as an example. It is an incredibly simple page that shows the glitching gif logo of the dev.to brand. It does not offer anything extra, except a link back home.

GitHub takes things a step future with their 404 pages. They use Star Wars as a pop culture reference to relate to the inner geek in me. GitHub goes a step further than most sites by tracking the users' mouse movement to create a parallax effect. I remember that this brought me a moment of joy when I found this page.

Suggestions Useful 404 Pages

There is much debate about what makes a useful 404 page. Dev.to does not provide many methods to recover, while GitHub by contract shows the full header and footer of the website and a second search bar.

In general, it's hard to say anything negative about giving help to users landing on a 404 page so they can recover. Bad 404 pages can cause users to leave the site altogether. A useful 404 page conveys to the user you care in helping them find the relevant information. It could also mean saving a customer or creating a new conversion.

1. Show consistent navigation so users can self recover.

2. Provide a secondary search to encourage users to find the content they seek.

3. Make suggestions based on the users' search history, current trending content, or just what you want to feature.

4. Provide links to any monitoring or status pages in case the 404 page shown was by some other error.

5. Show your brand and messaging off some. Delight.

The State of Default 404 Pages on Now

Zeit launched the second version of the Now platform (Now v2) without custom 404 pages. This forces customers to use the built-in default 404 pages. While the design is sharp and works great to fit the Zeit brand, it offers the user no assistance. It is also very opinioned and stands out against most brands. In short, you should replace it.

Replacing the Default 404 Page

The first thing we need is a new 404 page. I used Gridsome, which had me create a

404.vue

src/pages

404.html

/dist

Zeit uses a

now.json

The typically static site deployed on Now looks something like this -

{
  "version": 2,
  "builds": [{ "src": "package.json", "use": "@now/static-build" }]
}

Now uses this JSON file to create a static build based on the output of

npm run build

package.json

To setup custom 404 pages, we have to add routes.

Adding Routes

{
  "version": 2,
  "builds": [{ "src": "package.json", "use": "@now/static-build" }],
  "routes": [
    { "src": "/(.*)", "dest": "/$1" },
    { "handle": "filesystem" },
    { "src": "/.*", "status": 404, "dest": "/404" }
  ]
}

The first line in the routes array, says that any traffic that enters should look for content within the destination directory. Routing can be a little confusing in Now v2. By default, the

/dist

npm run build

The

{"handle": "filesystem"}

A.html

B.html

C.html

/dist

At this point, going to

/404

/not-a-real-page

The last line captures anything that was not found by the filesystem and sends the request to the

404.html

404

Final Results

I decided to leave things clean and minimalistic for the launch of my site. I left the header and footer on the page. I then spruced it up with an excellent illustration from https://undraw.co

Originally published on khrome.dev.