How to 404 Redirect in Joomla

Avinash Malla — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 07:18:01 +0000

You must have come across such situations in your website, where google has crawled some pages of your website, but later you moved that page somewhere. You might fear that u’re loosing the leads to your website. You must have seen your website showing 404 (”Page Not Found”) messages.

Well there are some simple things you can do in your Joomla website. You can either create a custom error page(404 page) and then redirect the 404 messages to the custom page or simply redirect it to the homepage.

1. htaccess redirection : You can simply add this code to your .htaccess file

ErrorDocument 404 index.php [to redirect it to your homepage]

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php [to redirect it to your custom error page named 404.php]

2. Metarefresh : You can edit templates/system/error.php to add the following line after line 19 in the file (just before the close of the tag)

[the number 5 is the delay, u can change it]

Using metarefresh technique, you will see the error page for a few while before it is redirected to the index page.

3. Header() function Redirection : I liked this the best. This technique uses the Header function. This is similar to the previous one but the interesting part is, if you use this technique, you won’t be seeing any error pages,not even for a few seconds.

All you have to do is add this code in the previous “error.php” file.

defined( ‘_JEXEC’ ) or die( ‘Restricted access’ );
header (”Location: /”); exit(); // add this line

Piece of cake, isn’t it?? Have fun with 404….!!

avinash malla » htaccess

How to 404 Redirect in Joomla