Redirect Checker

Enter any URL and we follow it one hop at a time — up to ten — reporting the status code, the destination and the response time of each step, plus the headers returned by the final URL.

Status codes that matter

• 200 — the destination resolved. This is what a clean URL should return in one hop.
• 301 — permanent. Use this for anything you have moved for good; it consolidates signals to the target.
• 302 / 307 — temporary. Search engines keep the original URL indexed, which is almost never what you want for a permanent move.
• 308 — permanent, method-preserving. Fine for POST-heavy endpoints.
• 404 / 410 — the chain ends nowhere. Every link pointing here is wasted.
• 5xx — server error at the destination.

Why chains hurt

Each additional hop adds latency for users, consumes crawl budget, and gives you another link in a chain that can break later. Two hops is tolerable; five means nobody has cleaned up after the last two migrations. Point the original URL directly at the final destination and delete the intermediate rules.

Common problems this finds

• http → https → www → trailing slash — four hops where one would do. Normalise in a single rule.
• 302 used for a permanent move — the old URL stays indexed and the new one struggles.
• Redirect loops — usually a conflict between server config and a plugin or CDN rule.
• Redirect to the homepage — treated as a soft 404 and passes almost nothing.
• Geo or device redirects — the crawler can be sent somewhere you never intended.

Reading the headers

The final response headers tell you more than most people check: x-robots-tag can carry a noindex that never appears in the HTML, cache-control reveals whether a CDN is caching the page, content-type confirms the encoding, and server plus cf-cache-status show what is actually serving the response.

Use it during migrations

Before go-live, run your redirect map through this against staging. After go-live, re-run your top 50 URLs by traffic and links. Migrations rarely fail because of one big mistake; they fail because of fifty small redirects that resolve into chains, loops or the homepage.