We’ve acquired the Smart Custom 404 Page plugin!
This lightweight yet incredibly useful plugin lets you set any regular WordPress page to be displayed when someone visits a broken URL on your site (getting a “404 Not Found” response).
We’ve been recommending this plugin for many years, specifically because it doesn’t issue any redirects. WordPress will still respond correctly with a 404 Not Found status code, and you can serve your visitors a page that’s much more helpful than a generic, default message.
The original developer, Peter Raschendorfer, decided to move on to other projects and “retired” the plugin in October 2023. Although he encouraged others to fork the plugin, that would still leave the current 100,000+ users in a tricky spot — if anything changes with WordPress and the plugin stops working, they’d have to scramble to find another tool.
So we reached out to Peter and offered to take responsibility for the plugin, and happily, he agreed!
We’re committed to maintaining it for the long term, and if any issues arise we’ll jump right in to help.
We’re grateful to Peter for his many years of service, and his desire to do what’s best for the community. Thank you, Peter!
Fulfilling our Mission
This plugin aligns with our mission at NerdPress: To help people do what they love so they can lead richer, more fulfilling lives.
Creating custom 404 pages may not have an obvious connection to that, but it’s these seemingly small details that collectively add up to having a more effective website — enabling you to be more successful by helping your visitors find what they need (even if they bump into that dreaded “404” response).
This is our third plugin acquisition in less than a year. We started with Hubbub Pro in December and then Optimize Database After Deleting Revisions just a month later.
We’re always looking for new ways to contribute more to the WordPress community, and maintaining this plugin is a great opportunity to do just that.
To all the current (and future!) users of the plugin, rest assured that we’re committed to improving and supporting this tool for the long term. And to our NerdPress clients, this is another step towards ensuring we provide you with the most reliable and innovative WordPress solutions now and in the future.
Glad to hear that this plugin will continue to receive support! This is the best 404 plugin out there. We are thankful to Peter for his dedicated work on the plugin and wish him the best. Thank you for taking up the project going forward!
I’m excited that we’re bringing this plugin to NerdPress. Thanks to Peter for all his hard work and trust in our team to steward this plugin forward into the future.
Thank you NerdPress folks for adopting this great plugin and giving it new life. Many thanks to Peter Raschendorfer for creating what is simply the best, streamlined 404 plugin out there. It does exactly what it needs to without needless bells and whistles and redirects. I held onto it after Peter retired from development and I am so glad I did! Cheers to all at NerdPress going forward.
Thanks for taking this one on. I had thought about it, but this is a much better fit with the NP ecosystem!
That’s really great news I’ve been using the plug-in for years and it did a great job – I tried to find something similar but there was nothing on the market. Thank you so much NerdPress for continuing the plug-in.