About the Redirect Checker
A redirect chain is the sequence of Location headers a browser follows before it gets a real page. One hop from http to https is normal; three or four hops through www, a trailing slash and a country selector cost hundreds of milliseconds on every visit and dilute the link value that search engines pass along. This tracer requests the URL without following redirects, records the status and Location of each answer, then requests the next URL, up to ten hops, and reports the whole chain with per-hop timing.
Read the status codes: 301 and 308 are permanent and cached by browsers and crawlers, 302 and 307 are temporary and are not. A chain that ends in 200 is healthy; one that ends in a 4xx or 5xx, or loops back on itself, is broken. The trace also flags HSTS on each hop, which tells you whether the https upgrade will be enforced by the browser in future.
Requests are made from our edge with a plain GET and no cookies; nothing is stored, and private addresses are refused. For the headers of the final page use the header checker, and to build the rules that fix a chain use the 301 redirect generator.
How to use
- Enter a URL, ideally the http:// version to see the https upgrade hop.
- Press Trace and read the chain from top to bottom.
- Aim for one hop to the final page; collapse chains longer than that at the server.
Common questions
- Why does it stop at ten hops?
- Browsers give up around twenty, and anything past a handful is a misconfiguration. The trace marks a chain that was still redirecting at hop ten.
- Does it detect JavaScript or meta refresh redirects?
- No. Those happen after the page loads in a browser. Only HTTP redirects, the ones sent as status codes with a Location header, are traced.
- What is the difference between 301 and 302?
- 301 is permanent: browsers and search engines remember it and transfer ranking signals. 302 is temporary: the old URL keeps its standing and is checked again next time.