How to Monitor and Fix 404 Errors in WordPress with Rank Math? Rank Math SEO

Key Takeaways

404 errors happen when someone requests a page or file that the web server can't find i'm kate and i'm going to show you how to identify and fix these errors with rankmath's 404 monitor if you can't see this feature in the left sidebar of your admin panel open rankmath's dashboard to enter the plugin's advanced mode there you need to activate the 404 monitor module it will start registering 404 errors once you activate it so when you open it for the first time you'll probably see an empty log you will notice there are three fields in the 404 monitor uri which means uniform resource identifier and represents the url that the user tried to access hits the number of times the error causing uri was accessed and access time that captures the time of the last hit on the uri but there is an important limitation to this data since it does not tell you if the error was caused internally or from an external website to find the source of the problem click on settings to switch to fro4 monitor's advanced mode the 404 monitor tab of rank math's general settings will open we recommend that you only use the advanced 404 monitor if you need additional information about where the 404s might be coming from that's because instead of grouping errors by their uri the advanced monitor will show them individually which might increase your error log significantly after you click on advanced remember to save the changes since each error only has one hit this column will be replaced by two others referrer and user agents their data will only be available for the errors that happen after you switch to advanced refer shows the url for the page that contains the wrong link even when that page belongs to another website if it's empty the error was due to a typo or another mistake in the address user agent shows the browser where the error happened this is important because it might be happening in a browser different from the one you're using so you wouldn't be able to reproduce the error and understand how to fix it the list may seem overwhelming but there are tools to help you browse through it you can increase or decrease the number of visible errors in a page by clicking on screen options button on the top keep in mind that items per page is the number of 404s you can see on one page before having to use the pagination to move to the next one if you wish to change the total number of errors recorded you need to click on settings at the top of the page the 404 monitor tab of rank math's general settings will open with the log limit option enter your preferred number there and save the changes to find specific errors you can open your browser's search functionality with the keyboard shortcut control plus f on windows and command plus f on a mac rank math also has a search option but it only works with exact matches so you need to enter that part of the url exactly as it appears in the uri field you can also order the uris alphabetically or by the number of hits and axis time the last two columns should be taken into account when you decide which errors to start with for instance looking for the errors with the higher hits and most recent last access before we start fixing the 404s let's take a quick look at the options in the 404 monitor tab of rank math's general settings we've already covered the mode and log limit the third exclude paths can be quite useful when you're making some changes to your website it stops unimportant urls from filling up the log and hiding real errors you can set exclusions where the 404 monitors will not check for errors using exact urls categories keywords or even regular expressions also known as regex it's possible to create more exclusion rules and have multiple exceptions the last setting ignore query parameters tells the monitor to ignore the part of the url that comes after a question mark if you see a lot of errors in the log file that have the same url but different query parameters you can enable this to have a cleaner log now that you know how to analyze the errors it's time to decide what to do with them for that you need to think about how visitors are finding that page they can be classified in two categories first are direct visitors which access your website directly through typing or pasting the url sometimes they type the wrong url in their browsers and there is nothing you can do other times the uri shows a correct spelling and the original url was the one with a typo this is the easiest type of 404 because you can fix it from the page editor click on the card to know how then there are referral visitors that can come from other websites social networks or even search engines to see those referrals you'll need to switch to the advanced monitor if the referral error is internal you can fix the broken source link in your content however when the referral is external you'll need to contact the website's owners and ask them to link to the correct url instead of the one that is causing a 404 when you can't fix a problematic url for instance if those website owners didn't respond to your request it's time to redirect visitors to another destination using ranked math's redirection tool to do that you can click on redirect right below the uri and make a simple redirection if you don't know how to use this tool click on the card to watch our tutorial on the other hand when several different uris are related to the same page you can select them in the check box to the left and use the bulk actions drop down menu to redirect them all at once they will appear as source uris in the redirection for the same destination url if you're not sure about which page or post a uri should redirect to you can investigate by picking keywords and searching them in your posts once the error url is redirected the number of hits will be in the redirections page instead of the 404 monitor so you should remove that 404 error from the list just hover over the error and click on the delete option the last option when handling 404 errors is ignoring them this applies to uris that have nothing to do with your site especially related to sales or giveaways they are caused by malicious users spammers and bad bots you can delete them from your furrow four logs individually or with the help of bulk actions if you've handled all the genuine errors and are left with a big list of spam 404s to delete you can just click on the clear lock button to the right but be careful clearing the log might be useful for testing purposes but it's unlikely that you would use it during the normal course of management for your website only use it if you know what you're doing once the log is cleared there is no way to get the lost data back only the errors that are recorded after clearing will be displayed if this tutorial helped you give it a like if you have any questions click on the link in the description to open a free support ticket you can find other tutorials and videos in our knowledge base at 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