What it is
A redirect is an automatic forward — a visitor asks for one address, and the server sends them somewhere else instead, usually invisibly and in a fraction of a second. A "redirect chain" happens when that forwarding happens more than once in a row: address A redirects to address B, which itself redirects to address C, before the visitor finally reaches the real page. Each of those hops is a separate round trip between the visitor's browser and your server (or servers).
Chains build up quietly over time — a page gets moved, then moved again months later, and nobody goes back to update the original redirect to point straight at the final destination. The old links keep working, technically, but only by stacking hop on top of hop.
Why it matters
Every hop in a chain adds its own delay before the browser can even start loading the actual page — on a slow mobile connection, two or three extra hops can be the difference between a page that feels instant and one that feels sluggish. Search engines also have to follow the same chain, and very long or looping chains can cause a crawler to give up before it ever reaches your real content, which can quietly hurt how well that page gets indexed.
Chains are also fragile: if any single link in the middle breaks (a domain lapses, a rule gets misconfigured), every visitor following that chain hits a dead end instead of your page.
How to fix it
- Find your redirects: check your hosting control panel, your
.htaccessfile (Apache), your_redirectsfile (Netlify), or your CMS's URL/redirect settings for a list of current rules. - Trace where old links actually end up by opening one in a browser and watching the address bar change — if it changes more than once before settling, that's a chain.
- Update the first redirect in the chain to point directly at the final, real destination address, skipping every address in between.
- Remove any redirect rules that are no longer needed once nothing points to them anymore.
- Re-check a few of your oldest or most-changed page addresses after updating to confirm each one now redirects in a single hop.