Crawlie
Home Free tools Site audit Blog About Contact
Run free audit
February 23, 2026

# Redirect Checker: Common Mistakes and Best Practices

Most problems with redirect Checker aren't caused by not knowing what to do — they're caused by small, easy-to-miss mistakes that compound quietly over time. Here are the ones that come up most often.

Mistake 1: Creating a redirect loop (A → B → A) — some browsers catch this gracefully, others just show an error page.

Mistake 2: Redirecting an entire old site to the new homepage instead of the closest equivalent page, which throws away targeted relevance for every migrated URL.

Mistake 3: Leaving redirects in place indefinitely instead of eventually updating internal links to point directly at the final URL, keeping needless hops in your own site.

The fix for most of these isn't more effort, it's a regular check. A few habits that prevent them from creeping back in:
- Audit redirects after every site migration or URL restructuring — this is when chains and loops get introduced, almost always by accident.
- Check redirects on both www and non-www, and http and https, versions of every URL — inconsistency here silently splits your link equity.

Worth reading alongside this: our guide to broken image links, which covers the adjacent side of the same part of a technical SEO audit.

Redirect Checker catches most of this automatically, which is the easiest way to stop these mistakes from shipping in the first place.

Try Redirect Checker yourself

Everything in this guide runs directly in your browser — no signup, no install.

Open Redirect Checker →
More on 301 redirect chains
The 301 Redirect Chains Checklist: What to Verify Before You Publish
A short, practical checklist for 301 redirect chains — the things worth checking every time, not just the first time.
Redirect Checker vs. Doing It by Hand: Is It Worth Switching?
A practical look at what Redirect Checker actually saves you over doing 301 redirect chains manually, and when manual still makes sense.
301 Redirect Chains FAQ: Questions People Actually Ask
Straight answers to the questions that come up most often about 301 redirect chains.
Audits & reports▸
Full SEO audit Competitor comparison
Technical SEO▸
Bulk URL indexability checker Robots.txt generator Sitemap generator Schema generator Redirect checker Broken link checker Backlink checker Image URL checker Internal link suggestion tool Keyword cannibalization checker Search intent cluster tool eCommerce keyword research tool Programmatic SEO page generator
Product & e-commerce feeds▸
Multi-channel feed generator Google Merchant feed generator Facebook product feed generator Pinterest product feed generator Google product category finder Competitor product research Merchant feed validator GTIN / EAN / UPC validator Product title optimizer SEO product description generator Slug generator Keyword density
Content & AI search▸
AI crawler &amp; llms.txt checker Readability counter Blog topic generator Google Discover headline generator AI Overview optimizer GEO checker Featured snippet optimizer Topical coverage calculator Meta tag generator
Sharing & distribution▸
SERP preview Open Graph preview UTM builder WhatsApp link generator RSS feed generator
No tools match your search.