A soft 404 happens when a page on your website sends visitors a normal "page found" signal, but its content looks like a missing or empty page to Google. Search Console then flags it as a soft 404, and the page is usually left out of search results even though it never actually returned an error.
What Causes a Soft 404
Every page your server serves comes with an HTTP status code. A working page should send 200 OK. A genuinely missing page should send 404 Not Found. A soft 404 is what happens when a page that should be a real 404 instead sends 200 OK, usually for one of these reasons:
- A product, listing, or post was deleted, but the page still loads with a "not found," "no results," or mostly blank layout, while quietly returning 200 OK.
- A custom error page was built as an ordinary page in your CMS instead of being wired into the server's actual 404 handling, so it never sends the 404 status at all.
- A page has very thin content, such as an out-of-stock product with no description, which Google can read as a soft 404 even when the status code is correct.
You'll usually first spot this in Google Search Console, under Page Indexing. Look at the exact label on the affected URLs: Not found (404) is a real 404, while Soft 404 is the issue covered here.
How to Fix a Soft 404 Error
- Open the affected URL in Search Console and check whether the content is genuinely gone, or whether it's a working page with too little content.
- If the content is permanently gone, make the page return a real 404 Not Found status (or 410 Gone if you're certain it won't come back), rather than a normal page that merely says "not found."
- If a similar or replacement page now covers that content, set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one instead of leaving it as a soft 404.
- If the page should stay live, add real content to it, such as a description, related items, or useful text, so it no longer reads as empty to Google.
- Once it's fixed, use Validate Fix in the Page Indexing report, or submit the page through URL Inspection, so Google re-crawls it.
Most content management systems, including WordPress, already send a correct 404 status for genuinely missing pages by default. A soft 404 is usually caused by a custom theme template, a plugin, or a redirect rule rather than the platform itself.
A soft 404 doesn't hurt the rest of your website's ranking. It just means that one page is unlikely to appear in search results until it's fixed.
If a page on your site is returning a real 404 you didn't expect, see How to Fix a 404 Not Found Error on Your Website.