Creating a custom 404 page for your GitHub Pages site

You can display a custom 404 error page when people try to access nonexistent pages on your site.

Who can use this feature?

GitHub Pages is available in public repositories with GitHub Free and GitHub Free for organizations, and in public and private repositories with GitHub Pro, GitHub Team, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see GitHub’s plans.

GitHub Pages now uses GitHub Actions to execute the Jekyll build. When using a branch as the source of your build, GitHub Actions must be enabled in your repository if you want to use the built-in Jekyll workflow. Alternatively, if GitHub Actions is unavailable or disabled, adding a .nojekyll file to the root of your source branch will bypass the Jekyll build process and deploy the content directly. For more information on enabling GitHub Actions, see Managing GitHub Actions settings for a repository.

  1. On GitHub, navigate to your site's repository.

  2. Navigate to the publishing source for your site. For more information, see "Configuring a publishing source for your GitHub Pages site."

  3. Above the list of files, select the Add file dropdown menu, then click Create new file.

    Alternatively, you can click in the file tree view on the left.

    Screenshot of the main page of a repository. Above the list of files, a button, labeled "Add file," is outlined in dark orange. In the file tree view of the repository, a button with a plus sign icon is also outlined in dark orange.

  4. In the file name field, type 404.html or 404.md.

  5. If you named your file 404.md, add the following YAML front matter to the beginning of the file:

    ---
permalink: /404.html
---

  6. Below the YAML front matter, if present, add the content you want to display on your 404 page.

  7. Click Commit changes...

  8. In the "Commit message" field, type a short, meaningful commit message that describes the change you made to the file. You can attribute the commit to more than one author in the commit message. For more information, see Creating a commit with multiple authors.

  9. If you have more than one email address associated with your account on GitHub, click the email address drop-down menu and select the email address to use as the Git author email address. Only verified email addresses appear in this drop-down menu. If you enabled email address privacy, then a no-reply will be the default commit author email address. For more information about the exact form the no-reply email address can take, see Setting your commit email address.

    Screenshot of a GitHub pull request showing a dropdown menu with options to choose the commit author email address. octocat@github.com is selected.

  10. Below the commit message fields, decide whether to add your commit to the current branch or to a new branch. If your current branch is the default branch, you should choose to create a new branch for your commit and then create a pull request. For more information, see Creating a pull request.

    Screenshot of a GitHub pull request showing a radio button to commit directly to the main branch or to create a new branch. New branch is selected.

  11. Click Commit changes or Propose changes.

Further reading