Redirect chains: what they are and how to fix them

A typical chain appears like this.

Each hop is an extra request and round trip, which slows the page for users, especially on mobile. Google's documentation says Googlebot follows up to ten redirect hops; beyond that, the URL is treated as an error. Even short chains add crawl work and make it harder to reason about which URL is canonical. Loops, where redirects point back to each other, make a page unreachable.

Crawl the site with a tool such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, which have redirect chain reports listing every chain from an internal link. Check a list of old URLs, such as those from a previous sitemap or analytics, with a bulk redirect checker. For individual URLs, a browser extension or command-line request shows every hop and status code. Also test your main host variants: http and https, with and without www.

Update each redirect rule so the original URL points directly to the final destination. Handle protocol and host in one rule where your server allows, so http://example.com goes straight to https://www.example.com. Update internal links, navigation, and sitemaps to the final URLs so internal traffic never hits a redirect. Keep the old rules; just repoint them. After deploying, recheck the chains report.

When you retire a page that is already a redirect target, update the earlier redirects to point at the new destination in the same change. Keep all redirects in one versioned place. On serionflow.com, redirects live in the host configuration file, and when we consolidated pages we pointed old URLs straight at the anchored section of the page that absorbed them. Our free broken link checker shows redirect status codes for every link on a page. SerionFlow is the wrong tool for collapsing redirect chains on your site; the rules live in your server, host, or CMS.