404 monitor and catch-all

RankKit SEO Pro This feature is part of RankKit SEO Pro. Start a 14-day free trial or see plans.

A 404 is a request for a page that doesn't exist: an old link from another site, a mistyped URL, or a page you deleted. A few are normal. Hundreds of hits on the same missing URL mean lost visitors and wasted crawl budget, and usually a redirect you forgot to add.

RankKit SEO Pro gives you two tools on RankKit SEO → Redirects. The 404 monitor tab lists the missing URLs people and bots request, so you can fix the ones that matter. The 404 catch-all tab sends every remaining 404 somewhere useful.

404 monitor

Turn it on

The monitor is off by default.

1. Go to RankKit SEO → Dashboard and find the Modules card.
2. Turn on 404 monitor ("Log missing pages so you can redirect them.").

Logging starts from that moment. Older 404s aren't recorded.

Read the log

Open RankKit SEO → Redirects → 404 monitor. "Most-requested missing URLs first. Vulnerability probes (wp-login, .env, .php) are ignored."

Column	Shows
URL	The missing path.
Hits	How many times it was requested.
Referrer	The last page that linked to it, when the browser sent one. Useful for finding broken links on your own site or on others.
Last seen	When it was last requested.

Fix a 404

• Click Redirect on a row. The redirect form opens with From filled in. Choose where it should go and click Save redirect.
• Click Dismiss (the × icon) to remove a row you don't need to act on, such as a one-off typo.
• Click Clear log to empty the list and start fresh.

Start with the URLs that have the most hits, and with any that have a referrer on your own domain: those are broken links you can also fix at the source. The broken link checker finds those for you.

What is logged

• One row per URL, with a hit counter, so repeated hits don't grow the table.
• Requests that look like vulnerability probes are skipped: paths containing .php, .env, .git, .sql, .bak, .ini, .log, wp-login or xmlrpc.
• The log prunes itself daily: URLs hit only once and not seen for 30 days are dropped, and the table keeps at most 5,000 rows.

404 catch-all

The catch-all redirects every request that would end in a 404 to the home page or a page you choose.

1. Go to RankKit SEO → Redirects → 404 catch-all.
2. Turn on Redirect every 404 page.
3. Set the options below and click Save.

Setting	Default	What it does
Send them to	The home page	The home page, A page (pick one) or A URL or path.
Redirect type	301 Moved permanently	301, 302, 307 or 308.
Never redirect these paths	Empty	"One per line: an exact path, a path ending in * for everything below it, or a regular expression between slashes."

What it never touches:

• URLs that match one of your redirect rules. Redirect rules run first.
• Missing files, such as images, scripts, fonts or sitemaps (any path ending in a file extension other than .html or .php).
• WordPress system paths: /wp-admin, /wp-includes, /wp-content, /wp-json, /wp-login.php, /xmlrpc.php, /feed and /.well-known.

The 404 monitor still logs each hit before the catch-all redirects it, so you keep seeing which URLs are missing.

Never redirect these paths
/members/*
/api/
/^\/temp-\d+/

Important Google treats mass redirects of missing pages to the home page as soft 404s. A 302, or a relevant category page, is often the better choice. Use the catch-all as a safety net, and add proper redirects for missing URLs that get real traffic.

Catch-all changes are saved through the Change Log, so you can revert them.

FAQ

Should I redirect every 404?

No. Redirect URLs that get real visits or have links pointing at them, to the closest matching page. Let random junk URLs stay 404: that's the correct answer for a page that never existed.

Why don't I see any 404s?

Check that the 404 monitor module is on. Also, requests answered entirely by a page cache or CDN never reach WordPress, so they can't be logged.

Does the monitor slow down the site?

No. It writes only when a request ends in a 404, and it updates one row per URL.