Bug report: Improper handling of custom 404 page

Hi Basilis –

In Enfold, under Theme Options, enable a custom 404 page and set it to a home page, as one might if they simply wanted 404s to get rerouted to the website home page.

Then, using a crawler such as Google Search Console, Screaming Frog SEO, AHrefs, or SEMRush, request a crawl of the site.

Even though the site is displayed in one’s browser, the server returns a 404 on direct requests to the homepage.

For example, let’s pretend I own https://kriesi.at/ and using Enfold I set the custom 404 page to be the home page. A visitor then tries to access a page that doesn’t exist, let’s say https://kriesi.at/thisPageDoesNotExist/ and rightfully receives a 404 and gets shown the homepage. No problem there.

That visitor then requests https://kriesi.at/ and though they’re shown the homepage, the home page is returned with a 404 error that just happens not to be visible to the user, but is visible to search engine crawlers.

This likely has an impact on search rankings.

Does this clear things up?

Please see the link in the private content area in this reply. I’ve set up a clone of my site and modified the Custom 404 to be the home page, as described above, and as you’ll see from the screenshot also linked in the private content it does return a 404.

Thanks

Thanks, Günter. I wasn’t aware those changes had been made. I have been working off the changelog published on themeforest. For that matter, the detail page on themeforest says the latest version is 4.5.1…

Regardless, I’ve updated the test site to 4.5.4 and using the “Redirect to selected page” option I get a 302 followed by a 404 once redirected, as shown in the screenshot linked below. I believe a 301 redirect would be better for SEO and probably more applicable since if a URL isn’t found (necessitating the 404) it is more likely to require a permanent redirect (a 301) rather than a temporary (302).

Using the new “Display selected page without redirect” results in a 404 as before.

And lastly, turning off the Custom 404 option still doesn’t remove the 404 header from normal page views. It appears that even if the custom 404 option is disabled. My guess is it’s got something to do with these two lines in class-avia-custom-pages.php

// if( ( avia_get_option( 'error404_custom' ) == 'error404_custom' ) && ( 0 != avia_get_option( 'error404_page' ) ) )
 if( 0 != avia_get_option( 'error404_page' ) )

It seems to be the check to see if a custom 404 is enabled has been commented out and now you’re only checking to see if the page exists. Since the error404_page option (probably) isn’t unset when the custom 404 option is turned off, any request for that error404_page id will always return a 404. Perhaps the better way to handle this would be to unset the error404_page option.

Or, a simple check to see if the page selected as the custom 404 page is also the home page would likely solve all 3 problems.

Thanks