Switching to Sparkle and 404

Hi everyone,
I have a question regarding “404 not found”. Things are moving smoothly
rebuilding a new website with Sparkle. On my existing website, that will be replaced with Sparkle, I have two lines of products. I’ve decided to drop one line of products and keep the one that is most profitable for me. The existing website has about 16 pages. All those pages URL’s will be non existent. Is there any options than a 404 to go about this?
I figure my new Sparkle website will have 12 to 15 pages.

I figure I would ask this question on Sparkle board since it’s probably an issue that could help someone else in my situation. Perhaps Duncan or a seasoned webmaster here can help out.
Many thanks.
Jay

The 404 (“not found”) setting is a server configuration. Very often it’s configured to open a “404.html” page, though it’s not universal. You can ask your web host about that. Once you know what filename it is you can just create a page with that name.

Keep the old file, delete the content and put a redirect in the header to point to your homepage:

meta http-equiv=“Refresh” content=“0; url=http://www.yoursite.com”/

Put a < in front and close with a >

Hello Duncan and @HPee
If all my URL’s from my existing website that I will replace with Sparkle will have no longer the same URL’s in Sparkle, It’s not a 301 that I need to tell crawlers and customers that it has been replaced permanently with all new URL’s? And also not to lose any “link juice” from the old page to the new.
Thoughts?

In this case a better option is probably to click the “Custom filename” checkbox in the page settings, and set the same filename you previously had on your site for each page.

Hi Duncan,
It’s not going to work, as you see, below are 3 examples out of 14 of skin and body care URL’s that I decided not to sell anymore. There won’t be no more “shop/products ****.html” and can’t use a URL’s of skincare & body care products with my line of products that I will be keeping, “promotional branding | ethical apparel”.

Is my only option a 301 redirect (page permanently deleted replaced with new URL’s)

J-A.

https://www.********.com/Shop/hempseed-oil-bar-soap.html

https://www.********.com/Shop/natural-handmade-soap.html

https://www.***************.com/Shop/natural-deodorant.html

That will have to be a manual server configuration then. Sparkle doesn’t have the ability to configure server redirects currently.