HTTP Status Codes
Quick reference for all standard HTTP status codes with descriptions. Search by code number or keyword.
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About HTTP Status Codes
A searchable reference for the standard HTTP status codes, grouped by class and explained in plain English. There are 61 here across the five families — 1xx informational, 2xx success, 3xx redirection, 4xx client error, and 5xx server error — and the first digit alone tells you who is at fault, which is the most useful thing about the scheme. Search by number when you have a code in a log, or by keyword when you know the behaviour you want and need the right code to return. Picking the correct status matters more than it seems: clients, caches, proxies, and crawlers all change their behaviour based on it.
Key features
- 61 standard status codes across all five classes
- Search by code number or by keyword
- Grouped and colour-coded by class, so severity is visible at a glance
- A plain-English explanation of what each code means and when to use it
- Covers the codes people actually look up — 301 versus 302, 401 versus 403, 422, 429
- Includes the less common but useful ones: 103 Early Hints, 206 Partial Content, 207 Multi-Status
- Runs entirely in your browser, so it works offline once loaded
How to use it
- Type a code number to jump straight to it.
- Or search by keyword to find the right code for a behaviour.
- Read the description to confirm it is the one you want.
- Browse by class when you want to compare the options within a family.
Tips & common mistakes
- The first digit assigns blame: 4xx means the client sent something wrong, 5xx means the server failed on a valid request. Returning 500 for bad user input misleads everyone reading the logs.
- 301 is permanent and 302 is temporary, and the difference is real — a 301 is cached hard by browsers and passes ranking signals, so a mistaken one is painful to undo. Use 302 or 307 when unsure.
- 401 means not authenticated and 403 means authenticated but not allowed. Sending 401 to a logged-in user prompts clients to re-authenticate pointlessly.
- 404 means not found and 410 means deliberately gone. A 410 tells crawlers to drop the URL, which is what you want after removing content permanently.
- 422 is the usual choice for a syntactically valid request that fails validation, where 400 signals the request itself was malformed.
- 429 should come with a Retry-After header. Rate limiting without telling the client when to come back guarantees they will hammer you.
- 204 No Content is the right answer to a successful DELETE or a form submission with nothing to return — better than 200 with an empty body.