Inner page availability check

What is inner page availability?

Inner page availability means the server delivers a specific URL on your website — say, shop.example.com/cart/ — with a 200 status code. Every page responds on its own: the fact that your home page loads tells you nothing about your cart or payment page.

The home page is usually the simplest page on the website and the best cached. Inner pages are more complex: the catalog builds product lists from the database and filters, the cart depends on the visitor’s session, and checkout talks to payment and email services. The more moving parts, the more places something can break.

What happens when an inner page goes down?

First and foremost, you lose sales that nobody counts as lost. If checkout is broken, visitors get as far as the cart and leave — and in your analytics it looks like an ordinary dip in conversion rate, not an outage.

The second risk is your ads. Google Ads checks ad landing pages with its AdsBot crawler, and an error on the page an ad points to is reason enough to stop showing that ad. Google Ads policy lists this among its examples of violations:

According to the same help page, ads in these cases are disapproved. In other words, your budget stops working at the exact moment the page it was sending people to breaks.

The third risk is search. Google doesn’t index pages that return 4xx errors, and prolonged 5xx errors get already indexed pages removed (Google documentation). A sneakier case is the soft 404, where a page looks like an error but the server reports success:

A regular status code check won’t catch this: on paper everything is fine, while the visitor sees “No products found” instead of the product.

The way to catch a soft 404 is to look for a specific piece of text on the page — something a working page always has: the product name, the price, the “Add to cart” button or the heading of your lead form. If the server returned 200 but the expected text isn’t there, the page doesn’t work for the visitor, whatever the status code says. You can also search the other way around — for error phrases like “No products found” or “Out of stock.” You can do this manually with your browser’s find feature, or with monitoring tools that can search for text on a page.

Which inner pages should you check first?

The pages that make you money and the pages you pay to send traffic to. For an online store or a service business, the priorities usually look like this:

Pick one page of each type: if the product page template breaks, it usually breaks for every product at once.

Why do inner pages stop loading?

Most often, it’s a change after which someone only checked the home page:

• A store module or plugin update. A new payment, shipping or cart module doesn’t play well with the theme or the PHP version, and the checkout page starts returning a 500 error.
• Automatic updates. CMSs, plugins and modules often update themselves without a developer’s involvement, so nobody knows the website has changed. A real-world example: on a WordPress website with the WPML multilingual plugin, an update can overwrite the settings in the .htaccess file, and inner pages start returning 500 (Internal Server Error).
• Heavy database queries. A filtered catalog or on-site search across thousands of products can’t build a response in time under load, and you get a timeout or a 503.
• A new URL structure. After moving to a new CMS or renaming sections, the old URLs that ads and links point to return 404 with no redirect.
• Deleted products. A product was discontinued and deleted, but ads and search results still send people to its page.
• Security rules. A firewall or CDN blocks requests to certain sections, such as the cart, because it considers them suspicious.
• A “nothing found” template. An empty category or a nonexistent product shows an error message with a 200 status code — and that’s how a soft 404 happens.

How to spot a problem with inner pages

The symptoms usually show up in your data, not on the home page:

How to check inner pages yourself

You’ll need a browser and Google Search Console:

1. Make a list of your 5–10 most important pages: checkout, cart, main categories, best sellers and ad landing pages.
2. Open each one in an incognito window and check the status code: developer tools (F12) → the Network tab → reload the page → the Status column.
3. On each page, use Ctrl+F to find text that must be there: the product name, the price, the “Add to cart” button. If the status code is 200 but that text is missing, you’re looking at a soft 404 or a broken template.
4. Walk through the whole purchase path: add a product to the cart and go all the way to the payment step. This reveals failures that only happen with an item in the cart.
5. In Search Console, open the Page indexing report and review the reasons related to Not found (404), Server error (5xx) and Soft 404.
6. For a single URL, run the URL Inspection tool in Search Console with a live test: it shows whether Google can access the page (Search Console Help).
7. Or use the FullCheckApp “Inner page availability check” and get the results in a clear visual format.

Search Console reports update with a delay, so you’ll only learn about an outage after Google has already seen it.

If you chose the last option, you’ve already made the right call: the check runs automatically, and you’ll be the first to know about any warning or critical issue.

What FullCheckApp checks

In addition to the home page, FullCheckApp checks up to 10 inner pages of each website once a day — the ones you’ve added to monitoring yourself. It opens them from the outside, just like a visitor, so there’s nothing to install on your website.

• Summary — how many of the added pages are available, for example “4/4.”
• Exactly which page failed — the report shows its URL, so you don’t have to hunt for the problem.
• Labels — green, yellow or red; you set the severity separately for each website.

After each check, you get an email report, and critical issues are also sent to Telegram.

If “No products found” appears on a page instead of its content, the page text changes. The page text change monitoring catches this kind of swap: it compares the page text with a baseline and shows what it was and what it became. Home page availability is covered in the article on the website availability check. If you run Google Ads, broken landing pages are tracked separately by the Google Ads error check.

FAQ

Sources

1. Google Search Central — How HTTP status codes, and network and DNS errors affect Google Searchdevelopers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/http-network-errors
2. Search Console Help — Page indexing reportsupport.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203
3. Search Console Help — URL Inspection toolsupport.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289
4. Google Ads Help — Destination not workingsupport.google.com/adspolicy/answer/16428019?hl=en
5. MDN Web Docs — HTTP response status codesdeveloper.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Status