Week 26 Technical Service Bulletin - How to action error status codes (4xx, 5xx)

24 Jun 2019 | Tech Update

Helen Grimbly
  • Tweet this item
  • share this item on Linkedin

This week, Helen Grimbly, Support Lead at Sitemorse has been looking at support requests related to the Function category (broken links). In specific, this week we're looking at the action 'url/fetch/errorstatus': Error status code received from web server'. This action includes error status codes such as 400 and 500:

Error status code 400 received ('Bad Request') 
Error status code 500 received ('Internal Server Error')

Status codes are issued by a server in response to a request made to the server. The returned codes indicate whether the request has been successfully completed or not. 

These Error status codes are something reported on by Sitemorse in the Function category. When an assessment has run, if a link has returned a status code like above, it will be displayed under the action, action 'url/fetch/errorstatus'. If your reports contain such actions, initally we recommend re-testing the link using SMARTVIEW, and checking previous reports for that link, to see if the issue is intermittent or continuous.

If the link is internal to your site then we also suggest that you look at your Server Logs at the time the errors occurred to further examine why your web server is returning that status code to Sitemorse. Sitemorse puts very little load on your website during its testing so if we are seeing errors then your visitors are almost certainly seeing errors too.

For 404 error status code we have covered more information in the following article: https://sitemorse.com/blog-article/9355/tech-update-404-status-file-not-found/