Handling HTTP 404 error

  • Some visitors of a WordPress website I created are seeing 404.html page when they request the homepage. This does not happen always and does not last for extended period of times. However it happens on regular basis about five to six time every day.

    I have Apache webserver on this website. Apache access logs does not say that HTTP 404 error occurs in these cases. It just says that homepage was requested and it also says that Apache returned HTTP status code 200. Based on the size of the response however I know that Apache serves 404.html page (and not the homepage).

    What is weird is that when I purposely request a non existent page from the website I clearly see in the access log that Apache responds with HTTP 404 status code.

    So a couple of questions:
    – why do visitors occasionally see 404 error page when requesting homepage?
    – why does WordPress sometimes reply with HTTP status 404 and other times with HTTP status 200 when it serves 404 error page?
    – can somebody explain what WordPress does when it encounters 404 error and how does that tie into what Apache does?

    Some more info:
    – .htaccess is fully generated by W3 Total Cache plugin and does not contain any reference to 404 error file (or any other error file)

    Thanks in advance!
    Igor

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  • Hi Igor – it’s possible your visitors simply typo’d your website URL. You didn’t provide the URL so we can’t look at it ourselves to see what’s happening.

    However, if this is intermittent, you might want to look closely at the error page. Some servers post a 404 error, but in smaller text below it says 403. A 403 error means the server is overloaded and can’t serve up the page at that time.

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