Keep redirect chains short

What this check does

Follows the redirect chain from the URL you submitted to its final destination and counts the hops. The check fails if a visitor has to follow more than one redirect before landing on a real 200 response.

Why it matters

Every hop is a round-trip — DNS, TCP, TLS handshake, HTTP response — added before the user sees anything. On a mobile network that’s 200–600 ms per hop, easily a second of preventable latency.

Search engines have hard limits. Google follows at most ten redirects per crawl attempt and stops indexing pages that sit behind long chains. Each hop also loses a small amount of PageRank in the process, so a 4-hop chain can lose ranking signal that the original page worked hard to earn.

Common chain pattern: http://example.com → http://www.example.com → https://www.example.com → https://www.example.com/. That’s three hops where one would do.

How to fix it

Collapse the chain so every variant of your URL points directly to the final canonical URL with a single 301.

nginx — combine the http→https, naked→www, and trailing-slash redirects into one server block:

server {
  listen 80;
  listen 443 ssl;
  server_name example.com www.example.com;

  return 301 https://www.example.com$request_uri;
}

server {
  listen 443 ssl;
  server_name www.example.com;
  # ... real config ...
}

Apache — rewrite to the final URL in a single rule:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Cloudflare — Rules → Bulk Redirects (or a single Page Rule with “Forwarding URL → 301”). Set the source pattern to every alternative host you own and the target to the canonical origin.

Audit yourself — curl -sIL https://example.com/ | grep -E '^(HTTP|Location)' prints every hop. Anything longer than two lines is a chain.

After fixing, update internal links and your sitemap.xml to use the final URL directly — there’s no point keeping a 301 alive for links you control.

Frequently asked questions

Is one redirect always okay?

Yes. A single 301 from http:// to https:// (or naked to www) is normal and passes the check. The fail trips at two or more hops in a row.

Will fixing the chain hurt rankings?

No — collapsing two 301 redirects into one 301 keeps the same final destination and preserves the signal you’d already earned. Google’s documentation explicitly recommends doing this.

What about old URLs from a CMS migration?

Keep them redirecting, but redirect them straight to the new URL — not to an intermediate URL that itself redirects. Walk through your old sitemap once and rewrite each rule to skip every hop after the first.