Redirect Checker
Every hop between the address somebody types and the page that arrives. One hop is normal and usually right. Four hops, because three separate rules each fire in turn, is the kind of thing nobody notices and everybody pays for.
What this checks
- Each hop in order, with its status code and what the move was — http to https, www to bare domain, or somewhere else entirely.
- Chains longer than three hops, which cost a visitor real time on a slow connection.
- Temporary redirects on what looks like a permanent move, which tell search engines to keep the old address.
- Loops, and hops that drop back to plain http part-way through a chain that ends secure.
What this cannot tell you
- We follow at most four hops. A chain longer than that is reported as too long rather than followed to the end.
- This checks one address. Redirects are often written per-path, so a clean home page says nothing about the rest of the site.
- Some sites redirect differently depending on the visitor — country, device, or whether they are signed in. You are seeing what we were sent, which may not be what you see.
Questions people ask
Are redirects bad for SEO?
A single permanent redirect is fine and search engines handle it routinely. What costs you is chains — three or four hops where one would do — and temporary redirects left on moves that happened years ago, which tell a search engine to keep indexing the old address.
Should my site be at www or without it?
Either, as long as you pick one and the other redirects to it in a single hop. The mistake is having both answer, which splits your site in two as far as search engines are concerned.
What is the difference between 301 and 302?
A 301 says the move is permanent, and a search engine will eventually treat the new address as the real one. A 302 says it is temporary and the old address should be kept. A permanent move left on a 302 is the commonest redirect mistake there is.