{"id":1016,"date":"2026-01-08T17:53:29","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T09:53:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/?p=1016"},"modified":"2026-01-08T17:53:29","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T09:53:29","slug":"how-to-fix-not-found-404-on-wordpress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/?p=1016","title":{"rendered":"How to fix \u201cNot found (404)\u201d on WordPress"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>

A \u201cNot found (404)\u201d 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.<\/p>

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,\u00a0 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.<\/p>

\"Example
Example of a Not found (404) error<\/figcaption><\/figure>

To check for \u201cNot Found\u201d errors, go to Google Search Console and click on Pages<\/strong> under \u201cIndexing\u201d in the left-hand menu. This will open the Page Indexing report. Look for \u201cNot Found (404)\u201d 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.<\/p>

\"Page
Page Indexing report in Google Search Console<\/figcaption><\/figure>

If you can\u2019t find \u201cNot Found (404)\u201d in the list, it means you don\u2019t have this problem. So, why are you reading this article?<\/em> If you do see \u201cNot Found (404),\u201d 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.<\/p>

\"Not
Not found (404) report in Google Search Console<\/figcaption><\/figure>

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.<\/p>

\"Examples
Examples of Not found (404) errors in Google Search Console<\/figcaption><\/figure>

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\u00a0 These are redirections used on the site to share download links. The \u201cNot Found (404)\u201d error messages are coming from external sites, in this case,\u00a0 \u00a0This 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.<\/p>

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

\"URL
URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console \u2013 internal link error<\/figcaption><\/figure>

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\u2019t 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].<\/p>

\"URL
URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console \u2013 internal link error<\/figcaption><\/figure>

It is also possible to find pages with \u201cNot Found (404)\u201d errors and no referring page, or a referring page that is also a \u201cNot Found\u201d 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 \u201cforgetting\u201d them. Rather than having a lot of 404 errors, it may be worth redirecting them if other relevant pages exist on the current site.<\/p>

Correcting Not found (404) errors on WordPress<\/h2>

If analyzing the pages listed in the Google Search Console \u201cNot Found (404)\u201d 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.<\/p>

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

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

\"Creating
Creating redirections in WordPress with SEOPress<\/figcaption><\/figure>

Done fixing? Validate Fix<\/h2>

Google gives you the opportunity to request an update of the Page Indexing error reports. If you have corrected several \u201cNot Found (404)\u201d errors, you can click on VALIDATE FIX<\/strong> 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.<\/p>

It can be nice to clean up all the \u201cNot Found (404)\u201d 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\u2019t add redirections.<\/p>

It is not recommended that you redirect large numbers of pages with \u201cNot Found (404)\u201d errors to the home page (although this feature is available in SEOPress for those who want to use it).<\/p>

\"How <\/div>


By Benjamin Denis<\/span> <\/span>
<\/span><\/p>

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. <\/p> <\/p><\/div> <\/p><\/div> <\/p><\/div> <\/p><\/div>

Featured Stories,Google Search Console#fix #WordPress1767866009<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A \u201cNot found (404)\u201d 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1017,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[210,168],"class_list":["post-1016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-green-sea","tag-fix","tag-wordpress"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}