How does one suppress a 404 status code in a WordPress page?

Question

I've got a WordPress site that includes pages pulled from a different database. The problem is that these other pages return a 404 status code. (The WordPress posts/pages are fine.)

The 404'ed pages display fine, and I removed the "Page not Found" text from the title tag in WordPress. But Googlebot and W3C see the 404 header.

So: wow does one tell Apache to suppress a 404 status? And will Apache override WordPress's 404 header?

Does that make sense? What other info and things should I be looking at?

Can I suppress the status code in .htaccess so I don't change WP core files?

Answer 1

You can either add custom rewrites to your pages. Or on the top of the template files that wrap your other pages just output header('HTTP/1.1 200 OK');.

Answer 2

WordPress offers the function status_header() to return the correct status-code.

You can call this function inside your WordPress template/function:

// Will return http status header "200 OK"
status_header(200);

Answer 3

Wordpress is PHP, so look for where it's sending something like:

header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");

Answer 4

Take a look at the pre_handle_404 hook (added in v4.5.0): https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/pre_handle_404/

// add to your functions.php
add_filter('pre_handle_404', function($preempt, $wp_query) {
    global $wp;
    $customPages = ['custom-1','custom-2','custom-3'];

    if (in_array($wp->request, $customPages)) {
      $preempt = true;
    }

    return $preempt;
}, 10, 2);