What does the http status code mean?
The http error 403 is an error message that is occasionally displayed in the web browser. The 403 error is one of the many hypertext transfer protocol responses that can appear when attempting to access a website. If the ‘403 Forbidden’ message appears in your browser instead of the website you requested, it means that you are not authorized to access the specified URL.
But why is access being denied? And is it still possible to reach the desired web page? The answers to these questions vary from case to case, as there are many possible causes for an http status code 403.
How does an http error 403occur?
The http 403 error message can occur when surfing the internet, in order to understand 403 errors, it helps to visualize the process of accessing a web page.
When you attempt to open a web page, the browser sends a request to the appropriate web server via the hypertext transfer protocol (http). The server then checks this query. If everything has been entered correctly, the browser sends an http status code of the ‘2xx success’ category (such as ‘200 OK’ or ‘201 created’) before loading the web page. This takes place within a fraction of a second and users do not usually see the code.
If the procedure fails, however, a different class of error message will be displayed. These ‘4xx client error’ codes, which include the ‘403 forbidden’ message, differ from the ‘2xx success’ messages. Each error code is distinguished by an automatically generated HTML error page. Of this class, the best known is the 404 error message. All 4xx http status codes are server responses that indicate that the request was unsuccessfully processed. As the status code name implies, the client is generally the – but not necessarily – the source of the problem.
The http status code 403 itself expresses that the requested URL does indeed exist, but the client’s request could not be carried out. The client was not authorized to access the webpage. However, the true cause for an http error 403 varies from case to case; there are many different reasons as to why an error 403 message might appear. With some websites, searching for specific directories is actively prevented by the 403 status. An example of this is when web pages contain images that can’t be accessed or copied easily. If this is the case, there is very little the user can do to gain access to the page. However, in most other cases, users can rectify a 403 forbidden error message. Read on to find out how.
