HTTP status checker

Get HTTP response codes.

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HTTP status code

HTTP response header

HTTP status codes

What is the HTTP Header Checker tool?

The HTTP Header Checker tool is an online curl test. It allows the HTTP response headers of any URL to be analyzed. Optionally send custom Referer and X-Pull request headers as well as content encoding options, like Brotli and Gzip. The results returned will give the complete curl output.

The HTTP Header Checker tool can be used to verify server configurations, like checking whether or not hotlink protection and file compression has been set up correctly.

How to Check HTTP Response Status Codes

There are a number of tools that can identify the HTTP status codes your website’s pages currently return. For a one-by-one analysis of a page, I recommend WebSniffer’s header check tool. When you arrive on the page, you want to enter the URL to the page you want to test. Then click submit for a basic check.

For a more advanced check, Web Sniffer lets you configure a few extra settings, including changing the user-agent from Web-Sniffer to different browsers or to Googlebot. That provides a helpful way to determine if every browser sees your website the same way and if Googlebot can see the website the same way as a human visitor.

After you’ve submitted, Web Sniffer will give you three pieces of information. First, Web Sniffer will give you the request header. This repeats the settings you had specified on the first step and can generally be ignored. But, if you need to remember what settings you had entered, especially if you used any of the advanced configurations, this request header information can be useful.

The more interesting information, and what we are after, is the response header. In this example, we can see that the requested URL of http://www.matthewedgar.net returns an HTTP response status code of 301, indicated the URL has moved permanently. Within the response header, we can use “Location” to see where this URL redirects to—in this case, it redirects to https://www.matthewedgar.net. That means the non-secure HTTP redirects to HTTPS, which is the expected behavior.

Finally, Web Sniffer also will also show you the content of the returned page if the content-length of the response header is greater than 0. In the case of a redirected page, the content-length is 0—that’s because no content is returned by the server when a redirect occurs. To see an example of this, let’s run a URL that returns a status code of 200.

Below this table, you will see the content for the status 200 page. This helps you compare what is returned against what you expected to be returned. For example, perhaps you load the page as Googlebot in Web Sniffer and see an entirely different HTML code than you do when loading the site in a browser—this would be a big problem for SEO and one you’d want to fix immediately.

The most common HTTP status codes and how they relate to SEO:

200 OK – good URL should always return 200. This means that the browser found the URL and the server returns a good content page. 

Warning! If a page inaccurately returns 200, (ie. the page actually doesn't exist and should return 404 Page not Found), it should be fixed (check .htaccess and rewriterules). Otherwise, it can hurt your SEO because Google won't be able to tell the difference between good pages and non-existent pages. It can create duplicate content on your site, which can lead to a penalty.

301 Moved Permanently

To move a page (or entire website), always use 301 redirects for good SEO. This tells Google to follow the new website. It transfers all the backlinks received by the old page to the new page. Make your 301 status redirects from .htaccess (using RewriteRule ... [R=301,L]) or PHP header(...).

302 Found

A lot of redirects are done like this. They are bad redirects for SEO because link juice is lost. Instead, use 301 redirects to preserve link juice.

404 Not Found

It's a good idea to see what pages return 404 and fix them (by either creating the missing page, or by 301 redirect it the URL to a page that does exist).