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.

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