404 page

Silktide checks that your website responds correctly when someone asks for a page that does not exist. The correct response is an error page served with the special "404 Not Found" status code, which tells browsers and search engines the page is genuinely missing.

The status code matters as much as the page itself. Some websites show a "page not found" message but send it with a success (200) status code - a so-called "soft 404" - and others redirect every missing address to their home page. Both look helpful but confuse the software your visitors and search rankings depend on.

Why this matters

Search engines, browsers, link checkers, and all rely on the 404 status code to know a page is missing. When missing pages return a success code instead, search engines keep the dead addresses in their index, visitors keep landing on them, and your search rankings suffer as engines conclude your site is full of thin, duplicate error pages.

Redirecting all missing pages to the home page is not better: visitors arrive somewhere they did not ask for with no explanation, and search engines learn to distrust your redirects. The better pattern is a genuine catch-all 404 page, plus specific redirects for individual moved pages that still receive valuable traffic.

How to fix it

Configure your web server or to return the 404 status code for unknown addresses. Most platforms do this by default; the problem usually comes from a catch-all route or redirect rule added later.
Give the 404 page useful content: say the page was not found, and offer a search box or links to key sections so visitors can recover.
Keep redirects for individual pages that genuinely moved - a redirect to the new home of the content is the right tool there.

You can verify your fix by visiting a made-up address on your site with your browser's developer tools open: the network panel should show a 404 status.

How Silktide tests this

Request your website's home page. If the home page itself does not respond normally, the test cannot be run reliably and the check passes.
Request a deliberately invented address on your website that should not exist.
Pass if that request returns the 404 status code; report the website otherwise (for example, when it returns a success code or a redirect).

Troubleshooting

We show an error page, so why does this fail?

What visitors see and what the server says can differ. Your error page may be served with a 200 (success) status code, which is what this check detects. Check your server or CMS configuration so the error page is sent with the 404 status.