Soft 404 Fixes
Return proper 404 status codes for empty search results, tag archives, category archives, and author archives.
The Problem
WordPress returns a 200 OK status for search queries with no results, empty tag archives, and empty category archives. Search engines treat these as valid pages, potentially indexing thousands of empty pages and diluting your SEO.
The Solution
Cacheability Pro detects empty result sets and changes the HTTP status code to 404 Not Found. This tells search engines these pages have no content and should not be indexed.
What Gets Fixed
| Scenario | Without Fix | With Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Search with no results | 200 OK | 404 Not Found |
| Empty tag archive | 200 OK | 404 Not Found |
| Empty category archive | 200 OK | 404 Not Found |
| Empty author archive | 200 OK | 404 Not Found |
Cache Benefits
404 pages are cached with a shorter TTL (default: 1 hour) compared to regular pages. This means:
- The origin server handles each empty search query only once per hour
- Bots crawling non-existent URLs get cached 404 responses
- Your cache doesn't waste space on long-lived empty pages