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Why 404 pages matters for a language school
9 Oct 2024
How a language school deals with 404 pages — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: a 2 MB photo in a 320-pixel slot. This breaks 404 pages for a language school.
Two-factor on the registrar account is the single highest-value thing we do for a language school when managing 404 pages. Everything else can be rebuilt; a stolen domain cannot.
Related work on this site follows the same principle: one job, a real inbox, no theatre. a language school did not need four analytics dashboards to know that Tuesdays are slow.
Most of the damage we see in 404 pages comes from doing too much. A single correct record beats three that were supposed to be clever.
The fix was to delete the old entry, wait for TTL to expire, and re-add 404 pages with the correct value. We scheduled it for 3 AM so nobody lost traffic.
WordPress can handle 404 pages with a plugin. But the plugin adds JavaScript, a dashboard, and a support ticket when it conflicts with the next update. We wrote four lines of config instead.
The most expensive outage for a language school was not a hack — it was a 2 MB photo in a 320-pixel slot. Nobody attacked anything. The config just drifted.
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