Every time a browser or a search engine asks your website for a page, the server answers with a three-digit HTTP status code. Most visitors never see those codes, but they say a lot about whether a site is healthy, broken, or quietly losing traffic.
A 200 means everything worked. A 301 or 302 means the page has moved, which is fine when it is deliberate, but a chain of redirects slows the site down and confuses search engines. A 404 means the page is gone, and too many of them usually point to broken links, deleted pages, or a migration that was never finished. A 500 means the server itself failed, which is the most urgent problem of all.
The habit worth building is simple: check the status codes on your most important pages on a regular basis, not just when something breaks. Your homepage, your pricing page, and the pages that bring in the most search traffic should all return 200. Old links from other sites should redirect cleanly to a live page instead of landing on a 404.
A free scan can surface these problems in a minute. Vulnerability Tools is a free website vulnerability scanner that also helps you spot the basic health issues that make a site look neglected to visitors and search engines alike. Run a check, fix the codes that should not be there, and repeat the scan after every redesign or migration.
Status codes are not glamorous, but they are one of the cheapest signals you can monitor. A site that answers cleanly is a site that is being looked after.
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