When a browser or crawler already has a cached version, it can send a conditional request (using If-Modified-Since or ETag). If nothing changed, the server replies 304 with no body, saving bandwidth and time. This makes repeat visits and re-crawls faster.
For SEO this is quietly valuable. Efficient 304 handling reduces load on your server and helps Googlebot spend its crawl budget on pages that actually changed — important for large sites where crawl efficiency affects how quickly updates get indexed.
There's nothing to "fix" about a 304; it's healthy behaviour. Problems only appear if caching headers are misconfigured, causing stale content to persist or fresh content to be missed.
This is a technical SEO topic I handle for clients:
Technical SEO →
