Most small-site owners I work with don't have a "redirect problem." They have a redirect history . Every redesign, HTTPS migration, slug tidy-up and plugin swap left a rule behind, and nobody ever went back to flatten them. The result is redirect chains: one URL bouncing through two, three, sometimes five hops before a visitor (or Googlebot) reaches the real page.

This post is the practical version: what a chain looks like, why it matters even on a 40-page site, the one pattern that does real damage (mass homepage redirects), and how to fix everything down to a single hop.

What a redirect chain actually is

A chain is any request that needs more than one redirect to resolve. A classic small-business example:

http://example.com/services → 301 https://example.com/services → 301 https://www.example.com/services → 301 https://www.example.com/services/ → 200

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Three hops for one page. Nobody planned that.…