About this plugin
Lobbit 404 Monitor records every page of your site that answers 404 and tells you how visitors got there. A broken link on one of your pages needs a different fix than an old address still in Google: the plugin tells them apart and helps with both.
Where the 404 comes from
Every visit to a 404 page gets one of six sources:
- Internal links: the visitor clicked a broken link on a page of your site. The plugin names the page, with a link to edit it.
- Search engines: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Ecosia and the other search engines, and AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. An old address is still in their results.
- Other sites: a link from another site or a social network, with the address of the page that links to you.
- Crawlers: Googlebot, Bingbot and the other robots, by name.
- Direct: no page sent the visitor: a typed address, a bookmark, an app or an email.
- Suspicious scans: robots looking for weak spots (.env, wp-config.php backups, old scripts, admin tools). Counted, but kept out of the list unless you ask for them, because there is nothing to fix.
Where the broken link is
For each address the details list the pages of your site that sent visitors to it, and the plugin searches the content of the site for the link: posts, pages, menu items, navigation blocks, template parts and reusable blocks, each with its Edit link. When many pages send visitors to the same address, the plugin tells you the link is probably in the menu, the header, the footer or a sidebar.
Fix it with a redirect
- One click: redirect to the home page, from the list or for many addresses at once.
- Or redirect to a page of the site, chosen from the list: the redirect follows the page when its address changes.
- Or to any other address, of the site or of another site.
- 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary). Each redirect shows how many visits it has redirected.
- A redirect works only while the address answers 404: publish a page at that address and the page wins.
- Optional: send to the home page every 404 that has no redirect of its own. Off by default, with a warning: Google treats mass redirects to the home page as 404 pages (“soft 404”).
Light and private
- No IP address and no user agent is stored: only the address, the page or site the visitor came from (without the query string) and the name of the crawler.
- One row per address, not one per visit, and a daily total per source. Addresses not visited for 90 days (you choose) leave the log by themselves.
- While the log is on, 404 pages are not kept by the page caches (LiteSpeed Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Rocket and the others that follow DONOTCACHEPAGE ), so every visit is seen; when you save a redirect, the cached copy of that address is cleared.
- Addresses you never want to record, like /favicon.ico or a whole folder.
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