How to fix “Not found (404)” on WordPress

A “Not found (404)” error message is an alert that Google Search Console can send to website owners. If encountered, it will appear on the Page indexing report as one of the reasons why pages are not indexed by Google.

A Not found (404) error indicates that Google has found a page on your site, but the page returns an error message. For example, if you click on this link,  you will land on an error page. This link was created to demonstrate an error; normally, this should not happen. If links within your website or from other sites lead to error pages like this, it can harm your SEO.

To check for “Not Found” errors, go to Google Search Console and click on Pages under “Indexing” in the left-hand menu. This will open the Page Indexing report. Look for “Not Found (404)” in the list of reasons why pages are not being indexed. Be aware that only ten reasons are shown by default. There may be more; see the controls at the bottom right-hand side of the list to view more rows.

If you can’t find “Not Found (404)” in the list, it means you don’t have this problem. So, why are you reading this article? If you do see “Not Found (404),” click on it to open the specific report. This will show a graph of errors over time and up to 1000 examples of this error on your site.

Our example shows that errors are decreasing over time. However, you should be particularly concerned if there is a sudden increase in errors. The list of examples displays the pages with errors, sorted by their last exploration date.

In the case of the Google Search Console report for the site protuts.net, which is used to illustrate this article, we can see a lot of errors with URLs like  These are redirections used on the site to share download links. The “Not Found (404)” error messages are coming from external sites, in this case,   This number of errors presents a bad user experience, and Google may consider pages with many erroneous links as low-quality, causing those pages to drop in rankings.

By inspecting each URL, we can see the referring page. This information will help you find broken links on your website.

In some cases, the referring pages will be from other websites. For example, links from Microsoft.com and Gatesnotes.com are sending visitors to protuts.net, but they are arriving on an error page. Normally, these are great backlinks for SEO, but arriving on an error page will probably mean they won’t count towards ranking. The team from Protuts should contact Bill Gates and ask him to update the links on his two sites. [Disclaimer: we manipulated this report from Google Search Console to add those links].

It is also possible to find pages with “Not Found (404)” errors and no referring page, or a referring page that is also a “Not Found” error. Google keeps a record of all the URLs it has found on your website and will test them over a long period of time before “forgetting” them. Rather than having a lot of 404 errors, it may be worth redirecting them if other relevant pages exist on the current site.

Correcting Not found (404) errors on WordPress

If analyzing the pages listed in the Google Search Console “Not Found (404)” report helped you find broken links on your website, you can log in to WordPress and edit the referring pages to correct the links. Simply edit the post or page with the error and either delete the link or replace it with another one.

SEOPress PRO also provides a neat 404 error monitoring feature. Go to SEO > PRO > Redirections / 404 to enable this feature and then click View your 404 errors. Various solutions are offered for managing errors including redirections.

You can also use the SEO > Redirections tool to create manual redirections. See our guide on enabling 301 redirects and 404 monitoring for detailed help on doing that.

Done fixing? Validate Fix

Google gives you the opportunity to request an update of the Page Indexing error reports. If you have corrected several “Not Found (404)” errors, you can click on VALIDATE FIX in the report to start the review. You will have to wait a few days for the results, and you should receive a notification by email when it is finished.

It can be nice to clean up all the “Not Found (404)” errors from your website, but it is not an obligation. If there are old pages that no longer exist on your website and there is no new equivalent (for example, an e-commerce site that stops selling a whole category of products may have lots of 404 errors for old product pages), you shouldn’t add redirections.

It is not recommended that you redirect large numbers of pages with “Not Found (404)” errors to the home page (although this feature is available in SEOPress for those who want to use it).

By Benjamin Denis

CEO of SEOPress. 15 years of experience with WordPress. Founder of WP Admin UI & WP Cloudy plugins. Co-organizer of WordCamp Biarritz 2023 & WP BootCamp. WordPress Core Contributor.