Redirect chain length

How many redirects stand between the address that was entered and the page that was served. Every hop is another round trip before anything renders.

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This row counts the redirects the scanner went through between the address that was entered and the page that was finally served. A typical chain is http://example.com → https://example.com → https://www.example.com → https://www.example.com/en/. Each step is a separate request: a DNS lookup or a new connection, then a full round trip, all before the browser receives a single byte of HTML. On a mobile network one hop easily costs 100–300 ms.

What the row means

Zero or one redirect is green — one is normal when, say, the bare address points to HTTPS. Two or more turn the row amber. Crawlers follow chains too, but every extra hop is wasted crawl time, and long chains can stop being followed altogether.

How to fix

Make every redirect point straight at the final address instead of at the next step. Merge the rules for scheme, host and language into one: http://example.com/ should go directly to https://www.example.com/en/ in a single 301. Update internal links, the sitemap and canonical tags so they use the final URL and never trigger a redirect at all. More examples are in the article on redirect chains; see also the http → https redirect.