Redirect Checker — Follow Any Link Through Every Hop

Paste a link and see every address it passes through before it lands, with the status code at each step. It names what is wrong in plain words, so you can tell a harmless hop from a loop, a temporary redirect that should be permanent, or a chain that ends in an error.

What a Redirect Chain Is

A redirect is a web server answering “not here, try this address instead”. One is normal. A chain is what you get when the address it sends you to does the same thing, and then that one does it again. Each link in the chain is invisible: the browser follows them quietly and you only ever see where you ended up.

Chains build up over years without anyone deciding to create one. A site moves to https, so everything gets a redirect. It drops the www, so everything gets another. A page is renamed, then renamed again. Nobody updates the first rule to point at the final address, so a visitor who follows an old link travels through all four.

Why It Matters

Every hop is a separate round trip to a server before anything is drawn on screen, which is felt most on a phone on a slow connection. Search engines are less patient still: Google follows a few hops and then stops for that visit, picking the trail up later, and a little of a page’s ranking strength is lost at each step rather than reaching the destination intact.

The error people meet most often is the circular case. ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS means page A sent the browser to page B, page B sent it back to A, and the browser stopped rather than go round forever. The usual causes are a rule that forces https fighting one that forces http, a www rule arguing with a non-www rule, or a caching layer answering with the opposite of what the server says. The chain above shows you which two addresses are passing the visitor back and forth.

Permanent and Temporary Are Not Interchangeable

The number on each hop is the part people get wrong. A 301 or 308 says the move is permanent: update your records, the old address is finished. A 302 or 307 says the move is temporary: keep the old address, it is coming back.

Use 302 for a permanent move and search engines do exactly as told. They keep the old URL in the index, and the new page does not inherit what the old one earned. It is the single most common reason a redesigned site loses its rankings, and the fix is one character in a config file.

What Each Status Code Means

The number on each row of the chain is the server’s own summary of what it did. These are the ones that turn up in a redirect chain, and what each one tells you to do about it.

Checking a Short Link Without Opening It

The other use is the opposite of housekeeping. A shortened link tells you nothing about where it goes, which is exactly why they are used to disguise a destination. Paste it here and the chain shows the real address it resolves to, without your browser ever visiting it.

Being able to read the destination is not the same as the destination being safe. The address may still be one you should not open. What this removes is having to click first in order to find out.

What This Tool Cannot See

Only redirects the server performs are visible here. If a page loads normally and then moves you using JavaScript, there is no status code to report and the chain will end at the page that did it. Meta refresh redirects are flagged separately for the same reason.

Some hosts also refuse connections that do not come from a home broadband address. Where that happens the result says the host refused rather than pretending the site is down, because those are different problems and only one of them is yours.

Related Tools

DNS Lookup shows which server an address resolves to, which is the step before any of this happens. Domain Name Checker tells you who owns a domain and when it expires, and the rest of the networking tools cover what else a connection gives away. If a chain ends on a page that will not load at all, the internet speed test tells you whether the problem is the destination or your own connection.

Redirect Questions