The 404 Page

vāk generates a custom 404 error page for your blog.

What is it?

The 404.html page is shown when visitors try to access a URL that doesn't exist. Instead of a generic server error, they see your custom page.

Customizing it

Edit templates/404.html to match your blog's style:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>Page Not Found - {{ siteName }}</title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="/style.css">
</head>
<body>
  <h1>404 - Page Not Found</h1>
  <p>The page you're looking for doesn't exist.</p>
  <p><a href="/">Go back home</a></p>
</body>
</html>

Available data

The 404 template receives:

siteUrl - Your site URL
siteName - Your site name

Deployment notes

How the 404 page works depends on your hosting provider:

GitHub Pages

Automatically serves 404.html for missing pages. No configuration needed.

Netlify

Automatically serves 404.html. You can also add a _redirects file for more control.

Vercel

Add a vercel.json to your output directory:

{
  "routes": [
    { "handle": "filesystem" },
    { "src": "/(.*)", "dest": "/404.html", "status": 404 }
  ]
}

Apache

Add to .htaccess:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

Nginx

Add to your server config:

error_page 404 /404.html;

Testing locally

With npx serve public, visiting a non-existent URL won't show your 404 page (serve doesn't support custom error pages). Deploy to test the actual behavior.