HTTP status codes were designed for machines talking to machines. A 200 simply means "request successful" – the server responded without error. But successful delivery of what, exactly?
Your page could return 200 OK while serving a blank screen from failed JavaScript. It could return 200 while showing a maintenance message. If you sit behind a CDN, you might get a cached 200 response while your actual server is completely down.
Uptime monitoring that only checks for 200 responses gives you a dangerously incomplete picture.
Google has a specific term for this problem: soft 404. When a page returns 200 OK but contains error messaging, thin content, or nothing useful, Google treats it as a failed page anyway – but keeps crawling it repeatedly.
This wastes your crawl budget. Google explicitly states that soft 404 pages consume crawling resources on URLs that don't return useful content. You can find these in Search Console under Indexing, then Pages, filtered by "Soft 404" in the "Why pages aren't indexed" section.
Google uses your mobile site for indexing and ranking. If your desktop version looks perfect but mobile has rendering issues, missing content, or broken functionality, that's what Google sees – and that's what affects your visibility.
A "responsive" theme doesn't guarantee mobile-first compliance. Test your actual mobile experience, not just whether elements resize.
Google confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal in 2014, but called it "very lightweight." It won't transform your rankings. However, being careless with certificate expiry or mixed content warnings signals neglect, and modern browsers actively warn users away from insecure sites.
Core Web Vitals measure what matters, with specific thresholds: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) should be 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) should be 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) should be 0.1 or less. These are measured at the 75th percentile of page loads.
Meeting them won't guarantee rankings, but failing them creates friction that costs conversions.
Basic uptime checks miss the real problems. Here's what actually works:
Content validation – check for an expected string in the HTML body, not just the status code. If your homepage should contain your company name and it doesn't, something's wrong regardless of what the server reports.
Visual verification – use screenshot-based synthetic monitoring to catch blank pages, JavaScript failures, and layout breaks that status codes can't detect.
Google's view – use Search Console's URL Inspection tool and click "View Tested Page" to see exactly what Google renders. If it's empty or broken, that's your ranking reality.
Journey testing – test complete user flows: contact form submissions, checkout processes, booking systems. A 200 on the form page means nothing if submissions fail silently.
Not sure what your site is actually serving? Our Snapshot Audit (£95) delivers a focused PDF report covering content delivery, mobile experience, and the issues automated tools miss – with prioritised fixes ranked by impact. Results in 48 hours.