Before building HTTP Status Code Reference, we checked the two most commonly recommended HTTP status code reference sites directly.
A years-old bookmark that now goes somewhere else entirely
httpstatuses.com has been linked from Stack Overflow answers, blog posts, and documentation for years. We navigated to it directly and watched it redirect to an unrelated site's general web-development glossary page — not a 404, not a "domain for sale" page, just quietly serving something else. Every old link pointing there is effectively broken now, without looking broken.
The revival site just quotes the RFC
Its spiritual successor, httpstatuses.io, is still up and lists every code — but each code's detail page is just the raw RFC text, verbatim: "A server that wishes to make public why the request has been forbidden can describe that reason in the response payload (if any)." Technically complete, but not the fastest way to answer "what does this actually mean" while debugging. This tool leads with a plain-English summary and keeps the RFC citation as a secondary reference below it.
Nobody says which redirect code to actually use
Neither site we checked calls out that 301/302 and 307/308 behave differently — 307 and 308 explicitly preserve the original request method and body on redirect, while 301/302 have a long history of clients silently changing the method to GET. Same story for 401 vs 403, and 502 vs 503 vs 504. This tool adds an explicit "often confused with" note directly on each of those codes.
