Guidelines · WSG 4.4
Setup necessary error pages and redirection links
A request that answers 404 is transfer and connection time spent on nothing, on every single visit, and a redirect chain taxes the first, coldest connection a visitor has. Both are pure waste with no design tradeoff attached.
How to satisfy it
- Fix or remove references to assets that no longer exist, including third-party tags that have gone dark.
- Point links, sitemaps and canonical tags at the final address of a page.
- Redirect in one hop: http to the https www form directly, not through a chain.
- Serve a useful, lightweight error page for the visits that still land on one.
Measured pages failing this guideline
From the 60 most recently measured pages. Each links to its full report.
- openai.com12 requests answered 4xx/5xx on load: transfer and connections spent on nothing, on every single visit.0.778 g CO₂e · 8.53 MB · about 76 kB recoverable
- shademap.app1 request answered 4xx/5xx on load: transfer and connections spent on nothing, on every single visit.0.102 g CO₂e · 1.08 MB · about 5.0 kB recoverable
- openrouter.ai1 request answered 4xx/5xx on load: transfer and connections spent on nothing, on every single visit.0.622 g CO₂e · 6.83 MB · about 2.8 kB recoverable
- thenewcuriosityshop.substack.com1 request answered 4xx/5xx on load: transfer and connections spent on nothing, on every single visit.0.247 g CO₂e · 2.64 MB · about 1.6 kB recoverable
- www.byhand.ai2 requests answered 4xx/5xx on load: transfer and connections spent on nothing, on every single visit.0.305 g CO₂e · 3.34 MB · about 1.2 kB recoverable
- www.nytimes.com6 requests answered 4xx/5xx on load: transfer and connections spent on nothing, on every single visit.1.69 g CO₂e · 14.83 MB · about 997 B recoverable
- forum.donanimhaber.com13 requests answered 4xx/5xx on load: transfer and connections spent on nothing, on every single visit.0.510 g CO₂e · 4.48 MB · about 356 B recoverable
- www.craigslist.orgThe address that was scanned goes through 3 redirects before the document is served, ending at https://www.craigslist.org/area/leipzig. Every hop is a full round trip on a connection that has not warmed up yet.0.086 g CO₂e · 760 kB
- www.netcup.comThe address that was scanned goes through 1 redirect before the document is served, ending at https://www.netcup.com/de. Every hop is a full round trip on a connection that has not warmed up yet.0.253 g CO₂e · 2.75 MB
- www.brainrotshorts.comThe address that was scanned goes through 1 redirect before the document is served, ending at https://www.brainrotshorts.com/. Every hop is a full round trip on a connection that has not warmed up yet.0.099 g CO₂e · 879 kB
- about.gitlab.comThe address that was scanned goes through 1 redirect before the document is served, ending at https://about.gitlab.com/. Every hop is a full round trip on a connection that has not warmed up yet.0.225 g CO₂e · 2.47 MB
- www.flickr.comThe address that was scanned goes through 1 redirect before the document is served, ending at https://www.flickr.com/. Every hop is a full round trip on a connection that has not warmed up yet.0.665 g CO₂e · 5.90 MB