Free Redirect Checker

Type a URL and you rarely land where you typed. Behind the scenes the server often answers not with a page but with a redirect — “not here, go there” — and your browser quietly follows. String a few of those together and you have a redirect chain: http becomes https, the bare domain becomes www, an old path becomes a new one, and only then does the real page load. Most of the time it's invisible and harmless. Sometimes it's two hops longer than it should be, or it points somewhere you didn't intend, and you'd never know from the browser alone.

That's what the tool above is for. As a redirect chain checker it sends one live request and follows every hop, laying them out in order with the exact status code and timing for each. You get to see the path a real visitor takes — and, just as usefully, check url redirect behaviour you assumed was fine: that a moved page lands in one hop, that http and https don't disagree, and that the chain ends at the destination instead of one redirect short of it.

Every hop carries a status code, and with redirects the code is the whole story. An http redirect code is any 3xx, but only a few show up in practice, and the difference between them is permanence — a single word that search engines act on.

Sometimes the chain doesn't stop. The browser follows hop after hop, eventually gives up, and shows the “too many redirects” error — ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS in Chrome. It's maddening because the server is responding every single time; it's just responding with “go somewhere else,” forever.

A loop is almost always two rules that each think they get the last word: an http-to-https redirect fighting a https-to-http one, a www versus non-www mismatch where each version points at the other, or a CDN like Cloudflare set to “Flexible SSL” in front of an origin that already forces HTTPS. Because the checker lays out every hop in order, the loop stops being invisible — you'll see the same two URLs ping-ponging right up until the chain caps out, and the exact pair that's fighting is sitting there in plain sight.

A redirect tester earns its keep on the boring things you assume are already true. Point it at your own domain and confirm the handful of redirects every site should get right: that http:// redirects to https:// in a single hop, that your bare domain and www resolve to one canonical version instead of both existing, and that a trailing-slash rule isn't quietly doubling every URL's hop count. Each of these is a one-line config that's easy to get subtly wrong, and each one, wrong, either leaks SEO or slows every visit.

Checking a redirect by hand tells you it's right at the exact second you press check. The trouble is that redirects break quietly — a deploy changes a rule, an SSL setting flips, a plugin rewrites a path — and nothing announces it. The first sign is usually a drop in traffic or a customer who hit a loop, long after it started.

That's the gap continuous monitoring closes. Point Uptura at the URLs you care about and it runs this same check around the clock — status code, response time, and the full redirect chain — and alerts your team over email or Slack the instant a redirect starts failing or the site goes down, then again when it recovers. Free during our public beta, no credit card — so a broken redirect is something you catch in minutes, not something you find in next month's analytics.