Redirect Chain Checker

How to use it

1. 1Enter the address you want to checkType or paste it into the field marked "Address to check", including the https:// at the front. Give it the OLD address — the one you want to know the fate of. Following the chain is the whole point.
2. 2Press Check and wait a few secondsThe request runs from our server rather than from your browser, so your cache, your extensions and your login session cannot affect the answer. That is the point of it: you are seeing what an anonymous visitor sees.
3. 3Count the hopsEvery redirect between what you typed and what finally answered is listed with its status code. One hop is normal. Three or more is worth fixing: each costs a round trip, and browsers give up eventually.
4. 4Check that each hop is the right KIND of redirectA 301 says "moved permanently" and passes signals along. A 302 says "temporarily elsewhere" and does not. A permanent move served as 302 for years is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes on this list.
5. 5Look for loops and dead endsA chain that returns to an address it already visited never resolves, and the tool names it rather than timing out silently. A chain ending in a 404 means the redirect works and points at nothing.
6. 6Share or keep the result within 24 hoursThe result has its own link you can send to whoever needs to act on it. It is deleted 24 hours after the check ran, so save anything you need to keep — and re-run the check after a change rather than trusting an old link.

About this tool

This tool follows a URL through every redirect it takes and reports the whole journey: each hop's status code, where it pointed, how long it took, and what is wrong with the route.

Redirect problems are invisible in a browser — it follows them silently and shows you the destination. But every hop costs your visitors latency, costs your pages ranking signal, and adds a link that can break. Chains grow quietly over years of migrations; this tool makes them visible.

Understanding the result

Resolved means the chain arrived somewhere. A loop or an over-long chain is reported as its own outcome — for this tool, "this URL never arrives" is the answer, not an error.

Each hop shows whether it was permanent (301/308) or temporary (302/303/307). Permanent redirects pass ranking signals; temporary ones tell search engines to keep the old URL indexed.

A meta refresh — a redirect performed by the page rather than the server — is looked for separately, because it never appears in the HTTP chain.

Example

http://github.com

301 http://github.com → https://github.com/
200 https://github.com/
1 redirect · resolved · no problems found

Limitations

• We follow a bounded number of redirects. A chain longer than that is reported as too long rather than followed forever — which is also how crawlers treat it.
• Redirects that depend on cookies, device type or geography may take a different path for us than for your visitors.
• A hop pointing into a private network is refused and reported, not followed.

Questions