200 OK

The standard success response: the request was understood and fulfilled, and the body contains the requested resource. The status every healthy page should return.

What it means

200 OK is the default success status. The meaning of the body depends on the method: for GET it is the resource, for POST it is the result of the action, for PUT/PATCH a representation of the updated resource. A 200 is cacheable by default when accompanied by appropriate freshness headers.

HTTP RESPONSE

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Cache-Control: public, max-age=3600
Content-Length: 5312

SEO impact

Beware the soft 404

Returning 200 OK with 'page not found' content is a soft 404. Search engines waste crawl budget on it and may index empty pages. Genuinely missing resources must return 404 or 410, not 200.

Why it matters

Crawlers only index content served with a 200 (or a 200 reached via a followed redirect); a healthy canonical URL must return 200.
Correct freshness headers on a 200 response drive browser and CDN caching, cutting load and latency.

Common mistakes

Serving error or empty pages with 200 (soft 404), which pollutes the index and wastes crawl budget.
Returning 200 for an API error while embedding an error object — clients then cannot rely on the status line to detect failure.

How WebInspect checks this

WebInspect reports the final status after following redirects and flags responses whose status does not match their content.
It surfaces the Cache-Control, ETag and Content-Type accompanying a 200 so you can confirm caching is configured.