Redirect Chains: How to Find and Fix Them

curl -sIL http://example.com/blog | grep -iE "^HTTP|^location"

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
location: https://example.com/blog
HTTP/2 301
location: https://www.example.com/blog
HTTP/2 308
location: https://www.example.com/blog/
HTTP/2 200

Three hops before the page loads. Each rule was reasonable when it was added. Together they make every visitor on that path wait for three extra requests.

• Slower pages. Every hop is a new request, often a new DNS lookup and TLS handshake. On mobile networks each one can add hundreds of milliseconds before the first byte of the real page, which drags down Largest Contentful Paint.
• Wasted crawl budget. Crawlers spend a request on every hop. On large sites that means fewer real pages crawled per day.
• Crawlers give up. Googlebot follows up to 10 redirect hops. Past that, Search Console reports Redirect error and the page is not indexed, just like pages returning errors.
• Muddier signals. Links pointing at the start of a chain have to pass through every hop. Collapsing the chain removes any doubt about where those signals should land.

Do not confuse it with Page with redirect in Search Console. That status only means the URL redirects somewhere else, so the target is indexed instead. It is normal for every redirect you set up on purpose.

• Layered normalisation rules: one rule for HTTPS, another for www, another for the trailing slash, each applied in sequence.
• Site migrations: old URLs redirected to URLs that were themselves redirected in a later redesign.
• Internal links that were never updated, so every click from your own navigation starts a chain.
• Plugins and platforms adding their own redirects on top of server rules.
• Loops. Two rules that send a URL back and forth never resolve. Browsers show a "too many redirects" error and crawlers report a redirect error.

1. Check one URL with curl -sIL as shown above, or with your browser's network panel with Preserve log enabled.
2. Check the whole site. UpCrawler follows every redirect it meets during a crawl and flags Long redirect chains when a URL takes more than 2 hops, with the full hop list in the sample so you can see which rule to change.
3. Check your internal links. Any internal link that returns a 3xx is a link that should point at the final URL instead.

1. Point every rule at the final destination. Each source URL should redirect once, straight to the URL that returns 200.
2. Combine normalisation rules into one. Redirect HTTP, non-www and missing trailing slash variants in a single step.
3. Redirect on the server. Meta refresh and JavaScript redirects are slower and weaker signals. Use them only where the server cannot redirect.
4. Update internal links, canonicals and the sitemap to the final URL so your own site never triggers a redirect.
5. Re-crawl to confirm every redirect now resolves in one hop.

Nginx: HTTPS and www in one hop

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name example.com www.example.com;
  return 301 https://www.example.com$request_uri;
}

server {
  listen 443 ssl;
  server_name example.com;
  ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/example.com.crt;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/example.com.key;
  return 301 https://www.example.com$request_uri;
}

Requests for http://example.com, http://www.example.com and https://example.com all land on https://www.example.com in a single redirect, instead of passing through HTTPS first and www second. The server block for https://www.example.com then serves the site. After forcing HTTPS, also check for mixed content left in old pages.