What are the potential drawbacks of not handling 404 errors properly in PHP applications?

Not handling 404 errors properly in PHP applications can lead to a poor user experience, as users may encounter confusing or unhelpful error messages. It can also leave your application vulnerable to security risks, such as information disclosure or potential attacks. To address this issue, it is important to customize the 404 error page to provide a clear message to users and log these errors for further investigation. 

<?php
// Custom 404 error page
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
echo "<h1>404 Not Found</h1>";
echo "<p>The page you are looking for could not be found.</p>";

// Log the error
error_log("404 Error - Page Not Found: ".$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
?>

Keywords

404 errors error handling HTTP status codes PHP applications user experience

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