Redirect chain
Definition: A redirect chain is a sequence of two or more redirects between the requested URL and the final page, such as HTTP to HTTPS to www to a new path, which adds latency and wastes crawl requests.
Also called: redirect hops, redirect loop, chained redirects
Updated
What one looks like
http://example.com/blog/post 301
https://example.com/blog/post 301
https://www.example.com/blog/post 301
https://www.example.com/articles/post 200Three hops before the visitor sees anything. Chains like this build up over years: an HTTPS migration, then a switch to www, then a new URL structure, each adding a rule on top of the last. A redirect loop is the broken version, where the chain points back to itself and never resolves.
What chains cost
- Speed. Each hop is another round trip before the page starts loading, which delays Largest Contentful Paint, especially on mobile networks.
- Crawling. Google says Googlebot generally follows up to 10 redirect hops for web content and treats longer chains as an error (HTTP status codes and network errors). Other crawlers, including AI crawlers, document no limit and may give up sooner.
- Signal clarity. Every extra hop is another place for a temporary redirect or a mistake to creep in.
Our view: aim for one hop from any old URL to its final destination. Two is tolerable during a migration; more is worth fixing.
How to collapse a chain
- Map each old URL straight to its final URL, not to the next step. Update the older rules rather than adding new ones on top.
- Combine normalization into one rule. Protocol, host and trailing-slash fixes can usually be handled in a single redirect at the edge.
- Update your own references. Internal links, canonical tags, hreflang annotations and sitemaps should all use final URLs, so nothing on your site triggers a redirect at all.
Trace every hop, with status codes, using the redirect checker, and see redirect chains: find and fix for a worked migration example.