Introduction
Shifter is a website platform that makes building and launching your website easy. It offers a range of features to help you create a website quickly and efficiently. One of the features is the ability to customize the 404 Not Found page, which is the page that is displayed when the user requests a page that doesn’t exist.
Common Issues
When generating a new site, Shifter will use the default Shifter 404 page instead of the designated 404 page from the site template.
Best Practices
If you create a 404.php page template in your sites theme directory (following the WordPress.org guide), you can expect it to work. Creating 404 templates with full site editing or a page builder may not be effective but this is the proper way to create an error page. To better resolve this issue for sites experiencing this we’ve developed an experimental plugin.
Experimental Shifter 404 Plugin
We’ve developed a plugin called Shifter 404 to help create the 404-page template when this issue occurs. This plugin works with Gutenberg and most other page builders. It will copy the 404 page as it renders in the browser and save it to the 404-page template file so the Shifter Generator can crawl the page.
https://github.com/getshifter/shifter-404
⚠️ Note: The Shifter 404 plugin is designed as an experimental plugin. Generating 404 pages should work as expected. If you are using this plugin to resolve your issue, please reach out and let us know. We’d like to work with you to expend the coverage of our generator to benefit all customers.
Conclusion
Shifter is a website builder platform to help you build and launch your website quickly and efficiently. However, occasionally it has issues with displaying the custom 404 Not Found page. It is best practice to put a 404.php file in the theme’s directory instead of setting the custom 404 Not Found page in the theme’s settings page. We’ve also developed a plugin to create the 404-page template when this issue occurs.