Magento 404 error page loading but server status is 500

Question

Our custom magento error page show fine and when expected (ie when there is no page). But I have just notice the page status returned for the server is 500 and not 404. How do I fix this, should this be setup in the nginx conf file for the website or is it set somewhere in the magento install?

Just to be clear, to the normal user everything is showing fine (does not effect user experience) but on a technical level the wrong page status is being returned from the server.

Answer 1

Turns out that was a old broken widget on the error page, that was calling from a external source in the footer that was stopping the page from fully loading so the server was correcly returning a 500 ( it visually it looked like the page had fully loaded). Once it was removed I'm getting the correct 404 status responce