200 🌐 HTTP

HTTP 200 OK (but something is still wrong)

The request succeeded at the HTTP level — yet the page is blank, the data is wrong, or an error is hidden inside the response body.

Seen on: JavaScript PHP REST API

Meaning

200 only means the server returned a response without an HTTP-level error. Plenty of real failures arrive as 200: APIs that wrap errors in the JSON body ({"success": false}), GraphQL (which returns 200 with an errors array), SPA fallbacks that serve index.html for every URL, cached stale responses, and login pages served with 200 after a silent redirect.

Common causes

  • API reports the error in the body with status 200 ({"ok": false, "error": ...})
  • GraphQL errors — always in the errors array, often with HTTP 200
  • SPA/rewrite fallback returns index.html (200) for a wrong API path
  • Redirect to a login page followed silently by fetch → final 200 with HTML
  • Stale content served from browser/CDN cache
  • Soft 404: “not found” page served with 200 (bad for SEO)

⚡ Quick fix

  1. Inspect the response body and Content-Type, not just the status
  2. Check res.redirected / res.url in fetch
  3. Return proper 4xx/5xx statuses from your own APIs
  4. For SEO, make “not found” pages return a real 404

Detailed fix by platform

JavaScript

  1. Check status, type and body-level errors:
    javascript
    const res = await fetch('/api/profile');
const type = res.headers.get('content-type') || '';
if (!type.includes('application/json')) throw new Error(`Expected JSON, got ${type} from ${res.url}`);
const body = await res.json();
if (body.errors || body.success === false) throw new Error(JSON.stringify(body.errors ?? body.error));

PHP

  1. Send the real status: http_response_code(404); echo json_encode(['error' => 'not_found']);

How to diagnose

  1. Body — What does the response body actually contain?
  2. Content-Type — JSON or HTML?
  3. Final URL — Did a redirect land somewhere unexpected?
  4. Cache — Is this a cached copy (Age / X-Cache headers)?

🧠 Still stuck? Analyze your error

Paste the full message, response headers or stack trace — we'll detect the platform and point to the most likely cause.