301 or 302 — which should I use?

301 for permanent changes (it passes SEO value); 302/307 only when the move is genuinely temporary.

Do redirects hurt SEO?

A single clean 301 is fine. Long chains and loops waste crawl budget and slow users, which does hurt.

Why force HTTPS with a redirect?

So visitors and search engines always land on the secure, canonical version of each page.

How to check a website's redirects

How to check website redirects (301 vs 302)

Redirects quietly shape both SEO and speed. A messy chain leaks ranking signals and slows every visit; a missing HTTPS upgrade is a security gap.

Tool: Redirect checker Try it now — free, no signup. Open →

What it is

A redirect sends a browser from one URL to another. A 301 is permanent (the page moved for good); a 302/307 is temporary. Each hop is an extra round trip before the page loads.

A chain is several redirects in a row; a loop never resolves.

Why it matters

Search engines pass most ranking value through a 301 but treat 302 as temporary, so the wrong type can cost you SEO. Long chains add latency, loops make pages unreachable, and a missing HTTP→HTTPS upgrade leaves visitors on an insecure version.

How to check

Enter a URL in the tool above. It traces the full chain with each status code, shows the final URL, detects loops and mixed content, and flags whether HTTPS is enforced.

How to fix

Use 301 for permanent moves so ranking transfers.
Collapse multi-hop chains into a single redirect to the final URL.
Force HTTP→HTTPS and pick one canonical host (www or not) to avoid duplicates.
Remove any redirect loop.