WHMCS CMS pages return HTTP 200 + Refresh: 0 / causes Google indexing issues (best practices?)

[BENELUX]

Hi everyone,

We recently ran into an SEO / Google Search Console issue on a WHMCS installation and wanted to share our findings and ask how others are handling this.

What we observed

WHMCS CMS/content pages (for example custom CMS slugs and the default /contact page) consistently return the following headers:

HTTP/2 200 OK
Refresh: 0

This happens on CMS and content routes, while transactional routes such as login.php or cart.php correctly return 301/302 responses with a Location header.

Why this is a problem

Modern search engines (Google in particular) treat a 200 OK response combined with a Refresh header as a soft redirect.

In Google Search Console this results in:

• “Redirect error” during URL inspection

• Pages not being crawled or indexed

• Canonical URL not being determined

From the browser’s point of view everything works fine, but for crawlers these pages effectively never get indexed.

What we verified

To rule out common causes:

• The issue occurs inside the WHMCS request flow, not at the webserver level.

• No custom hooks or addons are setting this header.

• The theme does not inject HTTP headers.

• A plain PHP test file outside WHMCS does not return a Refresh header.

• Removing the Refresh header at the webserver level immediately resolves indexing issues.

This strongly suggests the header is part of WHMCS core behavior for CMS/content pages, likely as a legacy fallback mechanism.

Current workaround

The only reliable workaround we found is stripping the header at the webserver level, for example in NGINX:

fastcgi_hide_header Refresh;

This:

• Restores proper Google crawling and indexing

• Does not appear to cause functional side effects

• Does not require modifying WHMCS core files

Questions for the community

• Is this Refresh: 0 behavior on CMS/content pages expected?

• Are others seeing the same Google indexing issues?

• Is there an official or supported way within WHMCS to disable this behavior?

• Has anyone found a cleaner solution than stripping the header at the webserver level?

It would be great to hear how others are dealing with this, especially on sites where WHMCS CMS pages are used for marketing content.

Thanks in advance for any insights 🙂