Check HTTP Headers

About Server Headers Check Tool

Check HTTP Server Headers. Just enter the domain. The tool requests the webserver to get its HTTP headers. These headers help check how a webserver responds to a request publicly.

What are HTTP headers?

HTTP headers are HTTP responses or HTTP Status Codes that enable the additional information or data to be sent out from the client (browser) and the server.

When a request is made to the server, or the user tries to access a particular webpage, the HTTP response is the precise information sent in response to the request made on the webpage or a website.

HTTP stands for hypertext transfer protocol, an application layer protocol that provides standard communication practices between the webserver and clients. The World Wide Web identifies that protocol, and Tim Berners-Lee is the one that created that protocol in the 1990s.

The history of the HTTP header is long and challenging. If you are someone, which deals with server management or from the programming section, then there are fair chances that you have already dealt with custom HTTP headers. However, you may come across the headers that do not adapt well to the specifications. That results in making everyone's job a little bit more complicated.

However, the current releases of the HTTP specifications have helped clarify and consolidate to get the HTTP request header format and syntax right.

HTTP headers help you get vital information, like the server's software version, content type, HTTP connection, cookies settings, date and time, etc. With HTTP response headers, you can call and inspect the HTTP headers that a particular server sent back in response to your request for a specific URL or webpage.


HTTP headers and SEO

We can attain much insight regarding technical SEO by viewing the HTTP response headers returned when the requests are issued to the server from the client (browser).

Implementing the essential SEO items in HTTP headers is more common and accepted practice than you may have an idea.

Do you know that you can declare canonical URLs in the HTTP header? The HTTP headers can also carry canonical tags. Therefore, you do not have to display them in the HTML code.

Evaluating HTTP response headers gives you valuable information about your technical SEO performances. A precise idea of each returned HTTP header is essential whether you are looking at canonical URLs or looped redirects.

Although it is the most adopted feature, most SEO tools ignore that check in the past. But today, because of HTTP headers' importance in technical SEO, various tools are available on the internet that allows you to check headers for SEO factors.

Get HTTP Headers; how to utilize the Server Header Check tool?

HTTP Server Headers are a hidden portion of a web page response that only a browser can see, and it is displayed nowhere when a user typically requests for any website or web page.

HTTP Headers are a code that instructs the browser what the browser's behavior should be while opening the requested page.

Several HTTP Headers are used to modify the browser's behavior. Some are Access-Control-Allow-Origin, Access-Control-Max-Age, Age, Cache-Control, Content-Language Content-Length, Content-Type, Expires, Location, Server, Set-Cookie, Transfer-Encoding, X-Frame-Options, and many more.

A browser may or may not send all the HTTP headers at once, and it depends on server configuration by web admin; how and when they want to send a specific header depending on situations.

For example, a web admin sometimes wants to specify cache time for a particular web page. Therefore, it will pass the Expires Header, which instructs the browser to save the resource in the cache and not request the resource again from the webserver on each request from the same user. In this way, the other HTTP headers also provide many modifications that a web admin can make in the user's browser.

If you want to check the HTTP headers or response headers for a particular web page, you can perform the following steps.

  • Open the HTTP Header Checker.
  • Enter any valid domain or IP address to check the response headers, and click on the "Check HTTP Headers" button.
  • The tool instantly processes your request and provides you the response headers.

From the HTTP Header Checker, you will get the following information.

  • HTTP response code is displayed.
  • The other information includes the date of inquiry, content type, website's server, etc.

Frequently occurring HTTP Status Codes:

The few standards, occurring HTTP Status Codes are

  • 200 OK: Having that Status Code means everything is OK. The browser has found the requested URL, the web page has returned, and everything is working smoothly and perfectly.
  • 403 Forbidden: Having that Status Code is a little bit alarming. That means that the server rejects the request and creates a hindrance for the Google bots that will affect your SEO. So, it would be best if you immediately fixed that bug.
  • 301 Moved Permanently: The HTTP Status Code shows the permanent redirection of the URL. It means that the URL has been updated and incorporated in the location field with the response.
  • 404 Not Found: The HTTP Status Code means that the requested webpage has not been found on the webserver and deleted by the web admin.
  • 503 Server Is Temporary Unavailable: The HTTP Status Code means something wrong with the webserver or web host that needs to be fixed immediately.