How to show homepage for 404 errors

Question

Instead of a standard 404 error page, I want to send 404s to the homepage and can't seem to get this working right.

If I add {% redirect '/' %} in my 404.html template, that works except it gives a 302 found code instead of a 404.

If I change it to {% redirect '/' 404 %} I get the correct 404 code but just a white screen instead of the homepage.

I've also tried adding ErrorDocument 404 / to the .htaccess file, but that doesn't take effect as I think the Craft 404 mechanism overrides that.

Can anyone help? Thanks.

Answer 1

404 isn’t a valid redirect status code, which is why {% redirect '/' 404 %} isn’t working correctly.

It sounds like you want to:

• first issue a 301 or 302 redirect to the homepage
• then serve the homepage, but with a 404 status

If I’m understanding you correctly, even if you could pull it off (maybe doable with a query string or something stored on the session), that would be bad for a couple reasons:

• the actual not-found resource is returning the wrong status code (301/302 instead of 404)
• now the homepage (a valid resource) is also returning the wrong status code (404 instead of 200)

The biggest issue is the 2nd one, as it would have devastating SEO consequences. Any time Google hits a missing resource and is redirected back to the homepage, it will start remembering that your homepage doesn’t exist.

A better solution would be to keep the URL pointed at the missing resource (so no redirect response), but to just render your homepage via the 404 template.

That should be as simple as creating a 404.html template with this:

{% include "index" %}

(or whatever your actual homepage template is called.)

If you have a Homepage Single section, you may need to pass that in as well:

{% include "index" with {
    entry: craft.entries.section('homepage').one()
} %}

(replace .one() with .first() if this is for Craft 2.)