Redirect Checker

How Redirects Affect Your SEO and Crawl Budget

A redirect sends a browser and a crawler from one URL to another. Used well, it moves ranking signals from an old page to its replacement and keeps visitors from hitting a dead end. Used carelessly, it drains crawl budget and leaks authority. Every extra hop in a chain adds latency for the reader and one more step for Googlebot to follow, and a long chain can cause the engine to stop before it reaches the final page. This tool shows each hop, its status code, and its timing so you can spot the waste.

The status code carries the meaning. A 301 is permanent and passes the strongest signal to the new URL, so use it for moved pages. A 302 or 307 is temporary and tells Google to keep the old URL indexed, which is rarely what you want after a real move. Two patterns cost you the most: chains, where A points to B points to C, and loops, where the trail circles back on itself and never resolves. An http hop in the middle of an https chain is another quiet leak worth fixing. The goal is one clean hop from the old URL straight to the final https destination.

How to Fix Redirects on Shopify, WordPress, and Custom Sites

Shopify

Create and manage redirects under Online Store, then Navigation, then URL Redirects. When you change a product handle or delete a page, add a 301 from the old path to the new one so the link equity follows. Chains build up over time as handles change more than once, so check an old URL here and, if it hops twice, edit the first redirect to point straight at the final URL. Confirm your store resolves on one primary domain rather than bouncing between the myshopify address and your custom domain.

WordPress

The Redirection plugin or an SEO plugin handles most redirects without touching server files, and it logs 404s you can then redirect. Watch for double redirects, where the plugin sends the browser one way and the server sends it another, which shows up as an extra hop here. Standardize on one version of your URLs, with or without www and always on https, and set that rule once at the server or plugin level rather than page by page.

Custom sites

Handle redirects at the server or CDN layer, in nginx, Apache, or your edge config, which is faster than an application-level redirect. Use 301 for permanent moves, keep each redirect to a single hop, and route http and non-canonical hosts to the final https URL in one step. After a migration, paste a batch of old URLs into this tool to confirm they each resolve in one hop with a 200 at the end.

Whatever the platform, audit redirects after any URL change or site move. A short chain today becomes a long one after the next migration, so fixing the first hop early keeps both readers and crawlers on the fast path.

When to Use a 301, a 302, or No Redirect

Choosing the right code decides whether ranking signals move or stay. Reach for a 301 when a page has moved for good, such as a retired product pointing to its replacement or an old URL structure pointing to a new one, because a 301 tells Google to transfer the old page's authority to the new URL. Use a 302 or 307 only for genuinely temporary cases, like a page down for maintenance or a short campaign redirect, since these keep the original indexed. Mislabeling a permanent move as temporary is a quiet way to stall a new URL that should be inheriting strength.

Sometimes the fix is to remove a redirect rather than add one. If an old URL still earns links and traffic and its content is still relevant, keeping it live can beat redirecting it. And when you delete a page with no natural replacement, a clean 404 or 410 is often healthier than forcing a redirect to an unrelated page, which Google treats as a soft 404 and may ignore. Match the response to the reality of the page.

How Redirect Chains Waste Crawl Budget and Slow Users

Every hop has a cost on both sides of the request. For visitors, each redirect adds a round trip, and on a slow mobile connection a three-hop chain can add a noticeable delay before the page even starts to load. For search engines, each hop consumes a slice of the crawl budget that could have gone to discovering new pages, and long chains risk the crawler giving up before it reaches the destination. Signals also weaken slightly with each additional hop, so a chain leaks a little authority at every step.

The fix is to flatten the chain. When you find that A points to B points to C, edit the first rule so A points straight to C, then retire the middle step once nothing depends on it. Run your most important old URLs and any recently migrated paths through this tool, aim for a single hop that lands on an https page with a 200 status, and re-check after each migration so new chains do not pile up on the old ones.

How to Audit Redirects After a Migration

A site move is where redirects make or break your traffic, so treat the audit as a launch step, not an afterthought. Before you switch, export the old URLs that earn traffic and links, and map each to its closest new equivalent rather than dumping them all on the home page, which Google reads as a soft 404. After the switch, paste those URLs here in batches and confirm each resolves in one 301 hop to the right new page. Fix any that chain, loop, or land on a 404 while the old rankings are still fresh and recoverable.

Keep watching in the weeks after launch. Search Console flags spikes in redirect errors and pages that dropped out of the index, and your server or CDN logs show which redirects fire most often. Standardize the site-wide rules once, forcing http to https and one host version in a single hop, so individual page redirects never stack a second step on top. A tidy redirect map recovers rankings faster and spares your crawl budget for the pages that still matter.