Free redirect checker

How to use the redirect checker

1. Enter the address exactly as people or links use it, such as http://example.com/old-page. Without http:// or https://, the check starts with https.
2. Tick "Also check the http, https, www and non-www versions" to test how your site handles every version of the address. This runs up to four chains.
3. Read each hop. Every request shows its status code and, for a redirect, the Location header it sent. The last line shows the final address and how many redirects it took.
4. Fix what the notes flag: loops, temporary redirects for permanent moves, chains with more than one step, and a final page that does not answer 200.

How the checker follows redirects

A browser follows redirects without showing them. The checker asks the server for each address and does not let the connection follow the redirect for it. It reads the status code and the Location header, then requests the next address itself. That is how it can show every step, including relative Location headers such as /pricing/, which it resolves against the current address.

It stops when a response is not a redirect, when the chain comes back to an address it already visited (a loop), or after 10 requests. Each step is checked before it is fetched: a redirect to another public website is followed, but a redirect to a private network address or a non-standard port is refused and shown as such. The page body is never read, so a large page does not slow the check down.

Redirect status codes

For SEO, the choice between permanent and temporary matters. Search engines move their listing to the new address after a permanent redirect. After a temporary one, they may keep showing the old address. The checker flags any temporary redirect in a chain so you can confirm it is meant to be temporary.

http, https and www

Most sites can be reached at four versions of the same address: http and https, each with and without www. Pick one version and redirect the other three to it, each in a single step. With the variants option, the checker tests all four and says whether they end on the same address. It switches www on and off only for a bare domain such as example.com or an address that starts with www, because www.docs.example.com is rarely a real address.

A clean setup looks like this:

http://example.com/       301 -> https://example.com/
http://www.example.com/   301 -> https://example.com/
https://www.example.com/  301 -> https://example.com/
https://example.com/      200

A common mistake is a two-step chain such as http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com to https://example.com. It works, but every visitor and crawler pays for the extra hop. Change the first rule to go straight to the final address.

The response headers it shows

For the final response, the checker shows these headers when the server sends them:

• Content-Type: what the page is, such as text/html.
• Cache-Control and Expires: how long browsers and caches may keep the response.
• Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS): tells browsers to use https for the site on every later visit. The checker notes when a final https response does not send it.
• X-Robots-Tag: indexing rules for search engines. A noindex here keeps the page out of search results, even when the HTML has no robots meta tag.

The checker never shows cookies or Set-Cookie headers, and it sends no cookies of its own, so a result never contains session data.

What it does not follow

The checker follows HTTP redirects only. A page that redirects with a meta refresh tag or with JavaScript answers 200, and the checker stops there. Search engines treat those redirects less reliably, so use a server redirect where you can. Results are cached for one hour per address.

Related tools

To find every redirect and broken link on a site, crawl it with the website crawler. To check that crawlers may read the final page, test it in the robots.txt checker. After a domain move, check that your sitemap lists the new addresses with the sitemap checker.