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Redirect Chain Checker — Trace Every HTTP Redirect Hop | TestURL.live
Redirects

Redirect Chain Checker — Trace Every Hop A URL Takes

Drop in any URL and see every redirect it goes through — 301, 302, 307, 308 — plus the timing of each hop, the final destination, and any redirect loops. Indispensable for SEO audits, migration validation, and tracking-link debugging.

Migrating a site? Don't lose link equity.

Spin up a preview URL on the new server and confirm your 301 redirects survive the move — before DNS changes.

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Why Redirect Chains Matter

A redirect chain is what happens when one URL redirects to another, which redirects to a third, and so on. Common culprits:

Every extra hop costs you about 50–250ms of perceived load time and a small amount of SEO equity. Google's official guidance is to keep chains short — ideally one hop, never more than five.

What This Checker Shows

Each hop's status code

301, 302, 303, 307, 308, or final 200 — see exactly which class of redirect each server returned.

Location target

The exact Location: header for each hop, including any relative redirects resolved against the previous URL.

Per-hop timing

Latency per hop. Spot the slow CDN edge that's adding 500ms before your origin even sees the request.

Loop detection

If you somehow chain back to a previous URL, we stop at 10 hops and flag the chain as truncated.

Redirect Chain FAQ

Why do redirect chains hurt SEO?

Each redirect costs a small amount of link equity and adds latency. Google recommends keeping chains short — ideally one hop, never more than five. Long chains can also exceed Googlebot's hop limit and cause pages to drop from the index.

What's the difference between 301 and 302?

A 301 is a permanent redirect: search engines transfer authority to the new URL. A 302 (or 307) is temporary: search engines keep the original URL indexed. Using 302 for a permanent move is a common SEO mistake.

Should I use 307 or 308 instead of 302/301?

307 and 308 are stricter: they preserve the original HTTP method (so a POST stays a POST). For HTML page redirects, 301/302 are still the conventional choices. For API endpoints, prefer 307/308 to avoid silent method-changing.

How does the checker handle private/internal URLs?

It refuses to follow redirects to private, loopback, or reserved IP ranges — to prevent the tool being used as an SSRF probe.

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