HTTP 500

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Errors happen, but it's important to know when they happen and how to solve them quickly.

What is a HTTP 500 error?

When you visit a web page the server responds with a status code followed by some content. A code of '200' means everything is good, and you can expect the page content.

A HTTP code of 500 means the server encountered a problem and can't carry on. If you're lucky, your visitors will see a pleasant but unhelpful error page. Most of the time though, an ugly and unbranded error page will be shown to your users, and they'll probably disappear.

What causes it?

Janitor will tell you what page the error was encountered on. What we can't tell you though, is what exactly caused the error. This is because the error happened on your server, and the server itself just responded saying it wasn't able to help. We have no more information to help.

However, armed with the page the error happened on and the exact time that the error occurred it should be very easy to find an entry in your server's error log, which should give us far more information about the problem.

Our crawled has a unique user-agent containing the text:

Janitor - https://getjanitor.com/

So spotting it in the error logs should be easy.

How often do you crawl?

We'll crawl your site daily, but if you think there's a problem you can request a crawl from your dashboard.

The number of pages we crawl on your site is limited based on your account level. We crawl your website in an intelligent way that prioritises pages that appear most prominently on your website. Pages found more often and higher up the page will be crawled before others. This means your main pages will probably be crawled before your privacy policy, for example.