Help Centre — Redirectdepth

Getting Started

Go to the Trace URL page. You'll see an input field with a placeholder URL.
Type or paste any public URL (with or without https://). If you omit the scheme, Redirectdepth prepends https:// automatically.
Click the Follow the chain button. The tool performs an HTTP HEAD request and follows every 3xx redirect until it reaches a 200, detects a loop, or hits the hop limit.
Read the results: each hop shows the status code, the destination URL, and what component changed (scheme, host, trailing slash, path, query, fragment). Hops marked avoidable could have been combined with another hop into a single redirect.
No account needed. No data is stored server-side — your results exist only in your browser tab.

No URL is too short, but some won't work. Redirectdepth runs on Cloudflare Workers and cannot open connections to other Cloudflare-hosted sites. If a known-working URL reports as unreachable, this is a platform limitation — not a signal about your target server. See the Known Limitations section below.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many redirects do you follow per chain?

The Free plan follows up to 20 hops. The Pro plan (not yet available for purchase — see below) will follow up to 50 hops. If a chain exceeds the limit, the tool stops and marks the last recorded hop with a "LIMIT" tag. The browser-default maximum is 20, so the Free limit mirrors what browsers do natively; going above that is the primary reason to upgrade.

Why does my URL report as "unreachable" when I know the site works in my browser?

Redirectdepth runs on Cloudflare Workers, and Cloudflare Workers cannot open a connection to a host that is itself behind Cloudflare. If you submit a Cloudflare-hosted site (including example.com, cloudflare.com, and a large portion of the web), the tool will report it as unreachable. This is a platform limitation of the Workers runtime, not a real result about your target server. Hosts verified to be reachable include github.com and wikipedia.org. We are exploring alternative backends to resolve this.

Do I need an account to use Redirectdepth?

No. The Free tier requires no account, no sign-up, and no personal information. Just paste a URL and get results. Redirectdepth does not store the URLs you check, does not use cookies, and has no user authentication system. The Pro plan will eventually require an email for billing purposes, but the checkout is not live yet.

Does Redirectdepth measure real user latency or page-load time?

No. Redirectdepth is a hop counter, not a real-user monitoring tool. It reports how many redirects a chain has, what each hop changed, and which hops are avoidable. It does not measure DNS resolution time, connection time, TLS negotiation, or time-to-first-byte. A short chain on a slow connection can feel slower than a long chain on a fast one — Redirectdepth cannot tell you that. For real-user performance data you would need an RUM tool or browser DevTools.

How do I subscribe to Pro? The checkout form seems to do nothing.

The checkout form on the Pricing page is a demonstration flow only. No real payment information is sent to any processor, and no subscriptions are created. A payment processor has not yet been connected. Pro features (bulk checking, CSV/JSON export, 50-hop limit, and eventually scheduled re-checks and change alerts) will be available for purchase once payment processing is live. Until then, all users have access to the full Free tier.

Does HEAD vs GET matter for redirects?

Per the HTTP specification, the redirect behaviour of HEAD and GET is identical — a server that redirects on GET should redirect on HEAD with the same Location header. In practice, a small number of servers handle HEAD differently or do not implement it at all. Redirectdepth uses HEAD to conserve bandwidth (the response body is not needed for a redirect chain trace). If you suspect a server is returning different redirects for HEAD vs GET, the results from Redirectdepth may not match what a browser doing GET would see. We use HEAD intentionally and document this as a known limitation.

Known Limitations

Cloudflare Workers cannot reach Cloudflare-hosted sites. Any URL served via Cloudflare's network reports as unreachable. Verified reachable: github.com, wikipedia.org. We are evaluating alternative backends.
20-hop limit on Free tier. Chains longer than 20 hops are truncated. The Pro tier will raise this to 50, but Pro is not yet purchasable.
HEAD method only. Some servers may redirect HEAD differently than GET. The HTTP spec says they must not, but reality varies.
No real-user latency measurement. Redirectdepth counts hops and reports URL changes — it does not measure time-to-live or connection speed.
Pro plan is not available for purchase. A payment processor has not been connected. The checkout form on the Pricing page is a demo. Pro features (bulk checks, export, 50-hop limit, scheduled re-checks, change alerts, priority support) are all unbuilt or mock-only.
No email sender. "Scheduled re-checks" and "change alerts" are listed as coming-soon on the Pro plan, but there is no email system in place to deliver notifications. These features will not ship until an email service is connected.
No persistent accounts. Redirectdepth has no user database, authentication, or saved-history feature. Every check is ephemeral.

Contact Us

No support mailbox has been set up for Redirectdepth yet. This is a known gap — we intend to add a contact route when the business infrastructure is in place.

If you have encountered a bug in the tool, found a URL that the tool handles incorrectly, or have a question about your redirect chain results, please direct your question to the business operator.

What to include in your message:

The URL you were checking
What result you expected vs what you saw
Your browser and any relevant context (e.g. "this URL works in my browser but the tool says unreachable")

We record this requirement in our internal tracker. Once a contact route exists, this page will be updated.