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Create a Custom Joomla 404 Page with 404 Status Code

Written by Nick Savov Nick Savov
Published: 29 October 2015 29 October 2015
joomla custom 404

Our first 404 tutorial was helpful to a lot of people. However, some users also wanted the status code of the page to be a 404.

This tutorial will show you how to create a custom 404 page with a 404 status code in Joomla. Let's get started...

Step #1. Create the article

Create a Joomla article as you normally would. There's only one difference this time:

  • Go to the Publishing tab
  • Set the Robots settings to "No index, no follow"
Create a Custom Joomla 404 Page with 404 Status Code

Step #2. Create the menu item

Next, in your hidden menu, create a menu item for the article. You can again set the "No index, no follow" in:

  • the Metadata tab
  • Robots

Once you're done, copy your menu item's alias before saving.

Step #3. Edit the error.php file

Use Joomla's template manager, your host's file manager, or SFTP to navigate to your template folder (i.e. /templates/your-template). Find the error.php within it.

If the error.php file isn't present, create it.

At the top of the file, make sure there's the following check: 

<?php defined('_JEXEC') or die;

Below it add: 

if ($this->error->getCode() == '404') {
     header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
     echo file_get_contents(JURI::root().'add-the-copied-alias-here');
 exit;
 }

Step #4. Test

Finally, test the code and make sure it's working. Go to a page that doesn't exist on your site, e.g.: www.yoursite.com/doesnt-exist

And make sure your 404 article appears.

Also, open up your browser's inspection tool or Firebug. Navigate to the Net tab of the inspection tool, then refresh the page. You should see the status code as 404. Congrats!