Redirects & server responses
Redirect chains of two or more hops
One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on every page of a site in a free audit.
- How serious
- Worth fixing. Weakens how Google reads or shows the page. Fix after the serious ones.
- Based on
- Industry standard: Google does not document this one, so the check follows established practice.
What is wrong
When someone visits one of your pages, they are sometimes sent to another page, which is then sent to yet another page. This is called a redirect chain. Instead of going directly from page A to page C, the visitor's browser makes two or more stops. Each stop is an extra request that takes time.
Why it costs you
Search engines follow these chains to find the final page, but the extra steps slow down their crawl of your site. On a large site, this wastes the limited time search engines spend indexing your pages. It also slows down real visitors, particularly those on slow connections or mobile devices, which harms user experience.
How to fix it
To fix this, find where the redirects are set up in your web server configuration or CMS and change them so each redirect points directly to the final destination, not to another redirect. If page A redirects to page B, and page B redirects to page C, rewrite page A's redirect to point straight to page C instead. This is usually a 1-step fix in your redirect rules or settings, not a change to individual pages.
What the audit tests
- The address reaches its final page in at most one redirect
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