These days you have to design your sites for both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. As most designers know, pages don't always look the same in different browser platforms. But it doesn't stop at page design, there's a bug in IE which could have a negative impact on your site. Now one of the reasons Wordpress has become so popular is because it takes the guesswork out of designing pages. It's now beginning to take the guesswork out of SEO too. However, you may be in for a big surprise if you're using a Custom 404 page inside Wordpress. Especially if you have an old site with 100's of pages outside Wordpress as I do. As more and more domain owners convert their sites to Wordpress, the 404 problem is going to become more common. You see I'm running about 10 domains on Wordpress and my browser of choice is Firefox. I always check my themes in Internet Explorer, but I don't usually check my 404 page in IE. I'm willing to bet a good number of Wordpress users have a simple redirect for their Custom 404 page and never check it in Internet Explorer. Well, get ready for a shock. If your redirect page is less than 512 bytes it won't work in IE. Can you believe that? A simple meta-redirect in your Wordpress 404 page does not work in IE. You have to add enough code to be over 512 bytes in order for a 404 redirect to work correctly. So if you love FireFox and Wordpress you might want to check your Blog in IE to see if your 404 page is working. If not, it could be costing you a lot of traffic. I reclaimed 100's of hits by correcting these pages and you can too. If you'd like to learn more about optimizing Wordpress as well as download the Best Wordpress Theme visit: http://www.bestwordpresstheme.com. |
