SEO tips for a better website experience
What are HTTP status codes?
But, what does a 401 code mean? What’s the difference between a 301 and 302 redirect, and what impact can these codes have on your browsing experience or ecommerce bottom line?
Don’t worry – today is the day when it all makes sense.
We’ll explain HTTP status codes and why they’re important to keep an eye on for your website.
Definition:
“HTTP”
^Hypertext Transfer Protocol: the rules for transferring files across the web.
“status codes”
^codes issued by a server to show if an HTTP request has been completed successfully… or not.
Why do I need to learn about HTTP codes?
When you know and audit these codes…
When you know and audit these codes…
HTTPS helps protect your customers’ privacy on your website. Ensuring your site is indexable and secure helps to positively impact your website’s search engine rankings and visibility.
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informational
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The 5 classes of HTTP status codes
The most common HTTP status codes you’ll likely come across are the 404 Not Found and the 200 OK status codes. 404 Not Found indicates that the requested page or resource could not be found on the server. The 200 OK status code, on the other hand, indicates that the requested page or resource was successfully found and loaded by the server.
How status codes can impact website performance
Codes that indicate errors with performance and accessibility:
Server-side means the website has a problem
- Issues with the server software
- Faulty database connections
- Server-side coding errors
Client-side means the user or client has a problem
- When the user mistypes the URL
- Browser or device issues
- The user has clicked a broken link
How to audit and monitor HTTP status codes for your website
Search Console is a great free tool provided by Google to help identify issues that are negatively impacting your website’s performance and accessibility. Once you have a Google Search Console account set up, check out the left-hand toolbar and visit Indexing > Pages and scroll down to view the “Why pages aren’t indexed” report. Here, you’ll see pages that cannot rank on Google, grouped by error type — including “Not found (404)” errors and Server errors. You can click on any of the groups to see the exact URLs that affected, and from here, validate which are the most important pages to your business that should be fixed first. Once you’ve completed your fix — e.g. redirected all broken 404 pages to an equivalent live page — you can revisit the error report in Search Console and click the “Validate Fix” button to ask Google to check the updated pages.
Need help with auditing HTTP errors? We can adapt raw data from SEO tools such as Ahrefs and transform it into clear, concise instructions for your web developer team. Or, if you’re short on time, we can liaise with your team for access to your CMS and implement our recommended fixes directly. Contact us for any questions – we look forward to hearing from you.
