What should all versions of my homepage redirect to?

One https URL, either with or without www, reached in a single permanent (301 or 308) redirect. Every other spelling should redirect to it rather than serving its own copy of the page.

What is a redirect chain?

A redirect that leads to another redirect before reaching the final page, such as http to https to www. Each extra hop slows the page down and crawlers stop following after several hops.

Use 301 or 308 for permanent moves so search engines transfer signals to the new URL. 302 and 307 mean temporary, and leave search engines unsure which URL to index.

Why test an inner page?

Some sites redirect the homepage correctly but serve inner pages both with and without a trailing slash, or in different letter cases, which creates duplicate URLs.

Free tools

Redirect checker

Enter a domain, and optionally an inner page. We test the http, https, www and non-www versions, plus index.html and trailing-slash variants, and show every redirect hop.

What passes

Every version of the homepage reaches the same https URL in at most one permanent redirect. Versions that serve a page directly, end somewhere else, take several hops, or use a temporary redirect are listed as problems with the fix next to each.

Why it matters

When two versions of a site both return 200, search engines have to choose which one to index, and links to the other version count for less. Redirect chains also slow down the first visit on mobile. Both are easy to fix at the server or CDN, and both are easy to miss because the site looks fine in a browser.

Related checks

Make sure your sitemap lists the final URLs with the sitemap checker, and confirm each page's canonical tag points at itself with the meta tag checker.

Questions

What should all versions of my homepage redirect to?: One https URL, either with or without www, reached in a single permanent (301 or 308) redirect. Every other spelling should redirect to it rather than serving its own copy of the page.
What is a redirect chain?: A redirect that leads to another redirect before reaching the final page, such as http to https to www. Each extra hop slows the page down and crawlers stop following after several hops.
301 or 302?: Use 301 or 308 for permanent moves so search engines transfer signals to the new URL. 302 and 307 mean temporary, and leave search engines unsure which URL to index.
Why test an inner page?: Some sites redirect the homepage correctly but serve inner pages both with and without a trailing slash, or in different letter cases, which creates duplicate URLs.

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