Redirect chains and hops: Crawl Audit check 49

Short answer: a redirect chain is when one redirect leads to another before reaching the real page: http:// to https:// to https://www. to the final URL. Each hop adds a delay for visitors and a step for crawlers. Check 49 warns at more than one hop. That's stricter than Google, which follows up to 10, but one hop is easy to achieve and the right target.

What Crawl Audit checks

Crawl Audit starts at http://yourdomain.com and counts the redirect responses (3xx) before it reaches the final page.

• Pass: one hop or none.
• Warning: two or more. The report lists every hop with its status code, so you can see where the extra one comes from.

The most common two-hop chain: http://example.com redirects to https://example.com, which then redirects to https://www.example.com. The fix is to send http://example.com straight to the final address.

What Google says

• "By default, Google's crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops."
• Google's site move guide: "Avoid chaining redirects", "we advise redirecting to the final destination directly", and if you can't avoid it, "keep the number of redirects in the chain low, ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5." It adds: "Chaining redirects adds latency for users".
• Google's crawl budget guide: "Avoid long redirect chains , which have a negative effect on crawling."

So two hops won't stop Google. It's still a slower first visit for every person who arrives through the old address.

How to collapse a chain

1. List the hops (Crawl Audit shows them, or run curl -sIL http://yourdomain.com).
2. Decide the one final URL: protocol, www or not, trailing slash or not.
3. Point every old variant directly at it, in one rule each.
4. Update your internal links, sitemap and canonical tags to the final URL, so visitors never hit a redirect from your own pages.

devmarde.com takes one hop from http://. Plain http://www.devmarde.com goes through two, one for HTTPS and one for www. That's exactly the case Google's "fewer than 5" leaves room for, and we'd still rather it were one.

On your platform

• Shopify, Wix and Squarespace: the platform handles HTTPS and the primary domain. Set your primary domain once, and avoid redirecting a page to another page that also redirects.
• Vercel and Next.js: Vercel redirects HTTP to HTTPS itself. Set the www-to-apex (or apex-to-www) redirect in the domain settings, and point redirects in next.config at final URLs.

Sources

• Google, HTTP status codes and network errors (updated 4 February 2026), checked 3 October 2026.
• Google Search Central, Site moves with URL changes; Google, Crawl budget management.
• Vercel, Redirecting domains.