🔗 Redirects & status codes

Redirect Checker

Enter a URL and we follow every hop of its redirect chain the way a crawler does — showing each 301, 302, 307 or 308 status, flagging chains and loops, and confirming the final destination and its status code. Clean redirects keep your ranking signals and your visitors on the right page.

✓ Follows the full chain Flags chains, loops & mixed HTTP/HTTPS No signup

Enter a URL and press Trace redirects. We'll show every hop with its HTTP status and the final page you land on — plus any warnings worth fixing.

What a healthy redirect looks like. One hop, a 301 or 308 for a permanent move, and a 200 at the end — no chains, no loops, no bouncing between HTTP and HTTPS or www and non-www. Each extra hop sheds a little link equity and slows the page, so point the source straight at the final URL.

How to trace a URL's redirect chain

Four steps from a URL to a clean, single-hop redirect.

Paste the URL

Enter the full URL you want to test, including https — for example https://example.com/old-page. This is the starting point of the trace.

Trace the redirects

Press Trace redirects and we follow every hop the way a browser or crawler would, recording each URL and the exact HTTP status it returned.

Read the hop chain

See each step colour-coded by status — green for a permanent 301 or 308, amber for a temporary 302, 303 or 307, red for a 4xx or 5xx error — with the final destination at the end.

Act on the warnings

Review the flagged issues — long chains, temporary redirects for permanent moves, loops, mixed HTTP and HTTPS — and fix them so the source points straight at the final URL in one hop.

Redirect questions

A 301 is a permanent redirect: it tells search engines the page has moved for good, passes the ranking signals along to the new URL, and the target replaces the source in the index. A 302 (and its stricter siblings 303 and 307) is temporary: it says "the page is briefly somewhere else, keep the original indexed." The practical trap is using a 302 for a move that is actually permanent — you keep the old URL in the index and you don't cleanly consolidate ranking signals onto the new one. For a permanent move, always use a 301 (or 308, its method-preserving equivalent).

Yes, a little, and it adds up. Every extra hop is another request the browser and the crawler have to make before reaching real content, so the page feels slower and each redirect can shed a small amount of link equity. Google generally follows several hops, but it doesn't have to follow forever, and long chains waste crawl budget on large sites. The fix is simple: keep it to a single hop by pointing the source URL straight at the final destination instead of at another redirect. If page A redirects to B redirects to C, update A to point directly at C.

A 404 means "not found" — the page is missing, but it might come back, so search engines keep checking for a while. A 410 means "gone" — you removed it on purpose and it isn't returning. When you deliberately retire a page and have nothing to redirect it to, a 410 tells crawlers to drop it from the index faster and more cleanly than a 404, and it stops them re-requesting a URL you never intend to restore. Use a 301 when there is a good replacement to send visitors to; use a 410 when the page is genuinely gone and a redirect would be misleading.

A redirect loop happens when URLs send visitors back and forth without ever landing on a real page — A redirects to B and B redirects back to A, so the browser gives up with a "too many redirects" error. Find the cycle by tracing the chain (this tool stops and flags it), then break it: decide on one canonical destination and make everything point there, or turn one of the URLs into a real 200 page. Common causes are conflicting rules — one for HTTP to HTTPS and another for www that disagree, or a trailing-slash rule fighting a CMS redirect. Resolve the conflict so a single, consistent rule wins.

Watch your redirects at scale?

The free checker traces one URL at a time and is rate-limited. Auditing thousands of URLs for broken chains, loops and temporary redirects that should be permanent — and catching new ones before they cost you rankings — is part of the managed service.

✓ Free tool: one URL at a time Site-wide audits: managed plans

Bulk redirect maps, scheduled re-checks after a migration, and alerts when a clean 301 silently turns into a chain or a 404. See plans on the pricing page.

See managed plans →