Missing Proper 404 Status Code
Requests for pages that do not exist return a success status instead of 404.
Why it matters
Requests for pages that do not exist return a success status instead of 404. Search engines then index those URLs as real pages, which dilutes your site in their index and makes genuinely broken links invisible in your analytics.
How ShipReady detects it
Launch signals that belong to the ORIGIN: whether unknown routes return a real 404, and whether robots.txt and sitemap.xml exist. All three are single facts about the deployment. Re-probing them per page would issue three requests per crawled page to re-learn the same answers.
Detection is deterministic. ShipReady reports this only when it observes the condition directly, and prefers to miss a real problem over inventing one. Rule version 1.2.0.
How to fix it
This is the prompt ShipReady puts in your report — written to be pasted straight into Cursor, Claude Code, or whichever assistant built the app.
The application returns a 200 OK status code for non-existent paths. Configure your web server or framework to properly return a 404 status code for missing routes to prevent SEO issues and client-side confusion.
Frequently asked questions
- What does "Missing Proper 404 Status Code" mean?
- Requests for pages that do not exist return a success status instead of 404.
- How serious is it?
- ShipReady rates this low. Worth fixing. Small individually, and they accumulate.
- How do I fix it?
- Paste the fix prompt on this page into Cursor, Claude Code or your AI editor. It is the same prompt ShipReady puts in your report.
- Can I check my own site?
- Yes — ShipReady scans up to ten pages of any public site for free and reports this alongside every other check.
Related checks
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