So what IS a 404 page? Whether you were linked here from a missing page on our website, or you just want to know what those numbers mean, we’ll explain it to you here:
You tell your computer that you want to see a webpage in a lot of different ways. Sometimes you click on a link from email, or a search result, or another website. Whenever you do this, your computer makes a “request” from the website that the link points at. The part right after the http:// is the computer where the page lives, called a “server.” It’s called a server because it “serves” other computers with the pages stored on it.
Every time you request a file from a server, the server first sends a “status code.”This code is a three-digit number that tells your computer some basic information about the page that it requested. There are a lot of these codes being sent every time you request a page, but you rarely see any of them, BUT
If the server can’t find the page that your computer requested, it sends status code 404. 404 means that the file your computer requested doesn’t exist on the server. It means “We don’t know what the problem is, but this server can’t find the file you’re looking for. It might be somewhere else, but we really can’t help you.” It’s like if you told a server in a restaurant “I’d like the filleted paddywhack” and he comes back and says “I don’t know what that is, but the chef says we don’t have it.”
