Redirect Checker
Follow a URL's redirect chain and see every hop with its status code and response headers.
Results are provided as is, for general information. Check anything important before relying on it. See the Terms of Use.
About this tool
Follows a URL's full redirect chain — every hop, each with its HTTP status code, destination, and a few key response headers — and flags the common problems: a redirect loop, a temporary redirect (302/303/307) used where a permanent one (301/308) would preserve more SEO value, an https-to-http downgrade mid-chain, or a chain long enough to be worth shortening. Like the Sitemap Extractor and URL SEO Audit tools, following redirects means fetching, so this tool sends the URL you enter to our server, which walks the chain behind a human-verification check through the same SSRF-guarded fetcher those tools use.
When to use it
Questions
301 vs 302 vs 307 vs 308 — which one should a permanent move actually use?
301 (Moved Permanently) is the long-standing default for a permanent move and is what search engines consolidate ranking signal onto fastest. 308 (Permanent Redirect) is the newer, stricter version of the same idea — it guarantees the request method and body are preserved on the redirect (a 301 technically allows a client to switch a POST to a GET, and some old clients do), which matters for redirecting a form-submitting or API endpoint. 302 and 307 are their temporary counterparts and tell crawlers not to transfer ranking signal to the destination — using one for a permanent move is the single most common redirect mistake this tool flags.
Why does a long redirect chain matter if the destination is correct either way?
Every hop is a full round-trip: the browser (or crawler) has to wait for one response before it even knows where to go next, so a 3-hop chain is measurably slower to first byte than a direct link — and on a slow connection it's very noticeable. Search engines also historically diluted link-equity signal per hop and, past a point, some crawlers give up following a chain entirely. The fix is almost always to point the original link straight at the final destination rather than leaving old intermediate redirects in place.
What exactly counts as a redirect loop, and why doesn't the tool just hang trying to follow it?
A loop is any URL that reappears later in the same chain — including the trivial case of a URL redirecting to itself. This tool caps how many hops it will follow (the same limit the Sitemap Extractor and Link Preview tools use) specifically so a loop fails fast with a clear error instead of the request hanging indefinitely; the hop list up to that point is still useful for seeing exactly where the cycle starts.
Why flag an https-to-http downgrade specifically?
Redirecting from a secure page back to an insecure one is almost always a misconfiguration, not an intentional choice, and it undoes the security and SEO benefit of being on https in the first place. Modern browsers frequently reroute it back to https automatically via HSTS, which can mask the underlying misconfiguration for months until it breaks for a client that doesn't have that protection — worth fixing at the source even when it appears harmless in casual testing.
The 'key response headers' — which ones, and why those?
This tool surfaces Location (the redirect destination itself), Cache-Control (whether browsers/CDNs are allowed to cache this specific redirect — a permanent redirect served without caching headers gets re-fetched every time, losing a real performance win), Content-Type, and X-Robots-Tag (a redirect response can itself carry a noindex directive, which is easy to miss). These are the headers most likely to explain surprising redirect behavior; the full header set for a hop is more than most audits need at a glance.
Can I check a redirect chain that starts with http:// instead of https://?
Yes — enter the http:// URL directly rather than letting this tool upgrade it, since the whole point may be to verify that your http→https redirect itself is configured correctly (status code, and that it lands on the right https page rather than a generic homepage fallback).
Why does this tool need a human-verification check?
Following redirects means making outbound requests from our infrastructure on your behalf — without a check, that capability could be abused as a free proxy for probing arbitrary URLs at scale, the same reasoning behind the Sitemap Extractor and URL SEO Audit tools' Turnstile gate. It also guards the same way against a URL that's designed to keep some automated fetcher busy indefinitely (an intentional slow-loris-style redirect target).