An HTTP status code is a three-digit code returned by a server in response to a browser or crawler’s request, indicating whether the request succeeded, was redirected, or encountered an error — such as 200 (success), 301 (permanent redirect), 404 (not found), or 500 (server error).
Understanding and correctly monitoring HTTP status codes across a website is fundamental to technical SEO, since incorrect codes can cause pages to be deindexed, ranking signals to be lost, or crawl budget to be wasted.
Regular status code audits, using tools that crawl an entire site, help catch unexpected errors, redirect chains, or misconfigured pages before they meaningfully impact search performance.
Status code monitoring is a standard part of our Technical SEO service.