How to check a website for chain redirects/circular redirects

I recently migrated one of my sites to HTTPS. Although this seems like a simple change, the site went down because circular redirects were accidentally created.

screenshot of page not working due to circular redirect
Screenshot of site down due to too many redirects.

There are a couple of tools you can use to identify chain/circular redirects. Not only will misbehaved redirects bring down your site, they can slow it down, and also adversely impact your search engine rankings. So, here are a couple of ways to identify these types of redirects.

  1. Using a command prompt. (this is more slick approach that will earn you some street cred with your IT folks) Type. “curl -L -i https://www.angelskills.com/wp”. Make sure you replace my blog with your own website:). If your redirects were setup correctly, you should only get HTML source code of the page.
Screenshot of Windows Command prompt showing the Curl command and 50 redirects
Screenshot of Windows Command prompt showing the Curl command and 50 redirects

 Now, if it’s not setup correctly, you will see a long list of redirects(reference screenshot above). In my case there were 50. This was not good. For a summarized review of this result remove the “-i” so this  “curl -L  https://www.angelskills.com/wp”. Now we have since resolved my circular redirect issue so I recreated an example for you to try out with curl. Use this link. “http://www.angelskills.com/test/a.html “. Most browsers are smart enough to know that this will cause an infinite loop but you can still see the magic by using curl or the Chrome extension below.

Screenshot of Windows Command prompt showing the Curl command. This was when I had a circular redirect in place.
Screenshot of Windows Command prompt showing the Curl command. This was when I had a circular redirect in place.

The other approach which isn’t as grandiose is to use a boring Chrome extension. “Redirect Path” works nicely.  

Screenshot of Redirect Path Chrome Extension tool
Screenshot of Redirect Path Chrome Extension tool