Redirect checker — trace the full redirect chain

Quick answer: paste any URL and see every hop it takes — status code, intermediate address and the page that finally answers. Chains, cross-origin endings and http-to-https detours are flagged.

What a chain actually costs

A redirect is not free, but it is not expensive in the way most posts claim. Google has stated that 3xx redirects do not lose PageRank, so the ranking argument for keeping chains short is weaker than you will read elsewhere.

The costs that survive scrutiny are these. Every hop is a full round trip before a single byte of the page arrives, which a visitor on mobile data feels directly. Every hop is a crawl request spent on nothing, which matters when a site already has more URLs than search engines choose to crawl. And a chain is fragile: three hops means three chances for one misconfiguration to strand the path entirely.

The pattern this tool is for

Change a product handle on Shopify and the platform creates a redirect for you. Change it again and you have two. Nobody notices, because the destination still works — the chain is invisible unless you trace it.

Where it bites is internal links. A link in your own navigation pointing at a URL that redirects twice is a self-inflicted cost on every page carrying that link. Trace the URLs you link to most, not the ones you happen to remember changing.

Reading the result

A one-hop chain is normal and usually not worth touching. Two or more is worth fixing on any URL you link to internally. A chain that ends on a different origin deserves understanding before anything else — it is either a deliberate migration or somebody else domain, and those want opposite responses.

An http start that lands on https is the most common single finding, and the fix is not a redirect change: it is updating whatever still links to the http URL.

Where to fix it on Shopify

Online Store, then Navigation, then URL Redirects. Point the oldest URL straight at the final destination rather than at the middle of the chain. Shopify URL redirects covers the interface and the cases where Shopify will not let you.

If the destination is not the page you expected, check the canonical URL on it next: a redirect and a canonical pointing different directions is a contradiction, and search engines resolve it by ignoring one of them.