What the redirect checker shows
A visitor can reach your site through several addresses: with or without www, over http or https, with or without a trailing slash. Ideally every variation lands on one canonical address in a single permanent redirect. In practice, after a few hosting moves and an SSL certificate added later, many sites send visitors through two or three hops, or keep two versions of the homepage online at once.
We fetch the address you enter, record each redirect with its status code and target, and report the final URL, its HTTP status and the time to first byte. We also test the www and non-www variants and the plain-http version separately to see whether they all converge.
- HTTP to HTTPS redirect, and whether it is permanent (301 or 308).
- www and non-www consistency — both should resolve, and one should redirect to the other.
- Redirect chains with more than one hop, and temporary 302 or 307 redirects where a permanent one is meant.
- Final status code, canonical tag and server response time.
Why redirects matter
Each hop adds a network round trip before anything appears, which hurts most on mobile connections. Search engines follow redirects, but long chains waste crawl effort, and a temporary redirect tells them the old address may come back, so the signals may not consolidate on the new one as quickly. Two live versions of the homepage — one with www and one without — split links and can show up as duplicates.
Redirects also matter for security. If http does not redirect to https, a visitor who types your domain without the prefix starts on an unencrypted connection. HSTS closes that gap once the first redirect is in place.
How to fix common problems
Choose one canonical host, either www or the bare domain, and redirect every other variant to it directly with a 301, in one hop. On most hosts this is a single rule in the server configuration or a setting in the hosting panel; on WordPress also set the site address to the canonical version. When you move pages, redirect each old URL to its closest new equivalent rather than sending everything to the homepage.