Can you redirect a 404 to a WordPress page and still show response code 404?

Question

As the title says, I would love to know if its possible to redirect to a WordPress page when an url is not found, but show a 404 response code on that page?

I've been playing around yesterday with header status 404 and location to a certain page in my 404.php, but this would always show a 200 response code.

I was wondering if I could do this without modifying the 404.php (only a redirect) and without a plugin.

Is there a tutorial or anything I can follow somewhere? I wasn't able to find this. Thanks in advance!

I tried all sorts of things:

<?php
header("Status: 404 Not Found");
header("Location: FULLURL / RELATIVEURL");
get_header(); ?>

But also these as response codes:

header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
http_response_code(404);
status_header(404);

I also tried placing the 404 under the redirect:

header("Location: FULLURL / RELATIVEURL");
header("Status: 404 Not Found");

• I also tried placing the 404 error codes on the page itself in a custom HTML block
• I even tried to iframe the page into the 404, but this wasn't the way to go either!

Answer 1

Have you tried a htaccess rule?

ErrorDocument 404 the-404-page-permalink

(changing the page to the actual URL of the desired page)

Or, does your theme have a 404.php page? If so, create a child theme (so you don't change the theme files which will get overwritten with a theme update) and create your own 404.php in your child theme.