What is an acceptable amount of 404 errors?

404 errors traffic percentage

[tatijana]

Hello!
I'm new here so please forgive me if this question has already been posted somewhere.

Does anyone know what is an acceptable amount of error messages in overall traffic reports?

So for example, if a site does a million page views/impressions per month, should error messages make less than 5% of that? Or does it vary from site to site?

We've noticed that some months we receive very large spikes in this area .

Thanks!
T

[cgrantski]

I used to do analytics at a company that hosted many sites and felt I had a pretty good handle on this one, because we as insiders knew which sites and servers were well tuned and which were not. You have to not count favicon.ico 404 requests. My rule of thumb was that a well-run site on a good server should have no more than 1/4 of one percent 404's. It seemed to be almost impossible to get lower than that.

Even these sites would get spates of 404's that could usually be traced to phishing bots.

5% is not acceptable at all. That would be a situation where heads would roll.

[JesperFJ]

To begin with I would only count 404 errors on .html, .asp(x) or .php files per unique visitor, and assume that for each of these I would loose a potential customer. If 1 out of 100 visitors get a 404, assume you loose 1% of potential sales.

Jesper