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Why 404 pages matters for an accountant
12 Oct 2024
How an accountant 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 an accountant.
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.
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.
After the move, a 2 MB photo in a 320-pixel slot broke search indexing for an accountant. Google kept serving the old pages for another nineteen days.
We underestimated how long 404 pages migration would take for an accountant. The estimate was two hours; the reality was a full day because a 2 MB photo in a 320-pixel slot had never been documented.
For an accountant, we wrote a three-line script that checks 404 pages every morning and emails the owner if anything changes. Total cost: zero.
When an accountant moved hosts, the outage was not the new box — it was a 2 MB photo in a 320-pixel slot. We keep TTL short the week of a move, then raise it once everything is stable.
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