We’ve all been there: you click on a link or a page and end up nowhere near where you wanted to go – on a 404 page. Of course, this shouldn’t happen to you, as your website is your digital storefront. In this article, we’ll clarify the typical causes of these “buzzkills”.
Status Code 400: Bad Request
Status code 400 Bad Request is a clear signal from the server that it cannot process your browser’s request. When this error occurs, the browser usually only displays a plain white page with this short error message. The main problem is that the cause is often not recognizable at first glance, as the interaction between your device and the server can be disrupted at various points.
Status Code 403: Forbidden – Access Denied
The 403 Forbidden error message appears whenever a user tries to access a page for which they lack the necessary permissions. Although the server understands exactly what the visitor wants, it deliberately refuses to execute the command. This often involves password-protected or private areas of a website that are not intended for the public, such as administrative interfaces or internal databases.
Status Code 404: Not Found
Error 404 is undoubtedly the most famous and most frequent error message on the internet. It appears whenever a server cannot find the requested page at the entered address. Essentially, it means that while the connection to the server is established, the specific subpage or file has disappeared without a trace or never existed in the first place.
Status Code 408: Request Timeout
Error 408 Request Timeout occurs when the connection between your browser and the server takes too long and the request time eventually expires. In this case, the server signals that it is no longer willing to wait and terminates the process prematurely. It is comparable to a clerk closing the window because processing an application is taking an unusually long time and the specified waiting period has been exceeded.
Server Errors
All errors starting with a 5 are server-side errors. This means these errors originate from the server itself.
Status Code 500: Internal Server Error
Status code 500 Internal Server Error is a generic error message indicating that an unexpected error occurred on the server, preventing it from processing the browser’s request. In this case, the server sends back this code because it knows something went wrong but cannot specify the error more precisely. Since the causes for this error can be extremely varied – ranging from faulty scripts to configuration errors or database issues – the solution is often not obvious at first glance.
Status Code 502: Bad Gateway
Status code 502 Bad Gateway occurs when a server acting as an intermediary receives an invalid response from another server it tried to contact to process the request. Overloading is often the reason why the target server stops accepting requests and responds with this error message instead. In such a scenario, capacities are simply exhausted, leading to a break in communication between the different technical layers.
Status Code 504: Gateway Timeout
The 504 Gateway Timeout error indicates that one of the technical instances within the connection chain is temporarily unreachable or that communication between the involved servers has been interrupted. In this case, a server acting as an intermediary did not receive a timely response from another server to complete the browser’s request. Since the time limit for this internal communication has expired, the system aborts the process and returns this error code.
Conclusion: Why you should never ignore errors
A clear rule applies to all technical problems and error messages on your website: they should be fixed as quickly as possible and ignored under no circumstances. Every error – whether a slow page load or a cryptic status code – massively impacts usability. Visitors lose trust, become impatient, and usually leave your site after just a few seconds to switch to the competition.