Last week I discovered something that changed how I handle 404 errors completely. I was staring at my WordPress 404 monitor showing “category/red-hat” as a broken link. The standard advice everywhere says “just redirect it to your homepage.” But wait – someone searching for red hat content doesn’t want to land on my tech blog homepage. They want red hat information or at least an explanation of why it’s not available.
That’s when I realized the traditional 404 redirect advice creates a worse user experience, not a better one. Instead of the lazy homepage redirect, I developed what I call the “404 Retired Archive” approach using RankMath’s 404 Monitor and Redirections tools working together.
