🔁 Redirect Checker

🔍 What This Tool Shows

Enter any URL and this tool follows every redirect a server sends, one at a time, recording the status code, the exact Location header value, and which server responded at each hop — up to 15 hops, enough to catch a genuine misconfiguration or loop without following one indefinitely.

📊 HTTP Redirect Status Codes

307 and 308 exist specifically to remove an ambiguity in the older 302/301 codes around whether a POST request's method and body should be preserved after the redirect — modern servers increasingly prefer them for exactly that reason.

⚙️ How This Tool Traces Redirects

🔒 Why a Browser Can't Just Do This Directly

Browsers block JavaScript running on ToolsNovaHub from directly inspecting another site's redirect response — reading a cross-origin Location header or intermediate status code isn't permitted by the browser's CORS security model, regardless of which site is being checked. A small, stateless server-side proxy performs the actual requests and relays back exactly what came back, unfiltered — the same honest approach any real redirect-checking tool has to use.

📈 Redirect Chains & SEO

A long redirect chain — several hops before reaching the final page — adds latency for every visitor and, in some cases, dilutes the ranking signal a 301 would otherwise pass cleanly. Search engines generally follow redirect chains, but a chain of three or more hops is worth collapsing into a single direct redirect from the original URL straight to the final destination wherever practical.

🔄 Redirect Loops

A redirect loop occurs when a chain returns to a URL already seen earlier in the same chain, or simply never terminates — usually from a misconfigured server rule (e.g., an HTTPS redirect that itself gets redirected back to HTTP by another rule). This tool caps tracing at 15 hops specifically so a loop shows up as a clear warning rather than hanging indefinitely.

❓ What This Tool Doesn't Capture

This tool follows standard HTTP-level redirects only (301, 302, 303, 307, 308). It does not execute JavaScript-based redirects (window.location changes) or HTML meta-refresh tags, since those require a full browser rendering engine rather than a simple HTTP request — a page that redirects purely via client-side JavaScript will show as a normal 200 response here, even though a real browser visitor would end up somewhere else.

❌ Common Mistakes

✅ Best Practices

Redirect directly from the original URL to the final destination in a single hop wherever possible. Use 301 (or 308, if method/body preservation matters) for anything intended to be permanent, and reserve 302/307 genuinely for temporary situations. Test any new redirect rule against existing ones before deploying, since two independently reasonable rules can combine into a loop neither author anticipated alone.

🔧 Troubleshooting

🔗 More Ways to Investigate a Website

Check response headers directly with HTTP Headers Checker. Verify security headers with Security Headers Checker. Check the certificate with SSL Certificate Checker, or run a broader scan with Website Security Scanner.