Error 404 (Page Not Found)
No worries! Page is still found.
Most probably you encountered this message of “404 Page Not Found Error” several times in your life, while browsing through internet or maybe within some apps. It can be scary or it can get interesting. For me, I found it interesting to research and know what this message really means.
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
Internet works in a way that our browser sends specific requests to the server and we get back web pages requested shown in our browser. In this case our browser acts as a client, when server sends responses for the client’s requests. The communication happening between client and server is managed by a contract or protocol. HTTP or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol by Tim Berners-Lee is a protocol created for this purpose and is used until today. For every loading of a web page we make an HTTP request to our site’s server and get HTTP response from it. Every modern websites consists of three parts: the protocol (http), the domain (medium.com) and the resource (/mystory). These three parts together are called Uniform Resource Identifiers or URIs (or so called URLs).
HTTP Status Codes
The process of sending the HTTP request to server from client’s side includes some messages that are easily readable for both us and the browser itself. These response messages make a list of status codes, which are agreed by HTTP protocol.
A status code is a 3-digit integer (number). The first digit represents the class of the response, while remaining two digits represent a specific status. The first digit can have only 5 primary values:
1xx : Informational (request received and continuing process)
2xx : Success (request successfully received, understood, and accepted)
3xx : Redirection (further action must be taken to complete request)
4xx : Client Error (request contains bad syntax and can’t be completed)
5xx : Server Error (server couldn’t complete request)
It is not required to learn or remember all status codes you see. Most common ones that usually a client can encounter are error codes, which include 403 Forbidden, 404 Not Found, 500 Internal Server Error, etc. For a web developer it can add some more codes to understand, both error and success messages.
Why HTTP Status Codes are important?
When you search for any URL, bots within search engines start seeing status codes. These status codes are important because they may affect how your web page is indexed and how search engines recognize the health of your site. Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will not be influenced by 100- and 200-Level codes, but if you have too many 400- and 500-Level Status codes, it may be a good sign that your site is not in high quality and rankings go lower.
Again, it is not important to learn all status codes, but knowing how to read and understand them will definitely help to troubleshoot the problems you get in your website quickly.
