How to fix redirect chain on Adobe Commerce (Magento)

Steps for Adobe Commerce (Magento)

1. Run Screaming Frog or Sitebulb against your store; export the redirect-chain report and record every chained URL plus its final 200 OK destination.
2. For links inside CMS Pages or CMS Blocks: go to Content → Pages (or Content → Blocks), open the affected page/block in the WYSIWYG editor, locate the linked text, and change the href to the final URL. Save.
3. For links inside category or product descriptions: go to Catalog → Categories or Catalog → Products, open the item, and edit the Description field to update any chained links.
4. For hard-coded links in layout XML or PHTML templates: locate the relevant template file under app/design/frontend/<Vendor>/<Theme>/ (or the core module override), find the href, replace it with the final URL, and deploy static content (bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy).
5. Review URL Rewrites under Marketing → SEO & Search → URL Rewrites; if a rewrite's Target Path is itself a redirect rather than a final URL, update the Target Path to the true destination and save.
6. Clear the full-page cache (System → Cache Management → Flush Magento Cache) and re-crawl to confirm all chains are gone.

What is redirect chain?

A redirect chain occurs when clicking or following a link takes a visitor (and search engine crawlers) through two or more redirects before landing on the final page — for example, Page A → Redirect 1 → Redirect 2 → Final Page. Each step in that chain is an extra stop the browser and Googlebot must make before reaching the real content. Even a single unnecessary redirect adds latency; a chain of two or more compounds the problem significantly. The fix is straightforward: change the link's href so it points straight to the final URL, cutting out all the middlemen.

Every hop in a redirect chain costs you in three ways. First, PageRank (link equity) is diluted with each redirect — Google has confirmed that it loses some signal at every step, meaning pages at the end of long chains rank lower than they should. Second, each hop adds real load time (typically 100–300 ms per round trip), which directly hurts Core Web Vitals scores like Largest Contentful Paint and Time to First Byte — both ranking factors in Google's page-experience signal. Third, Googlebot has a limited crawl budget per site; chains waste that budget on intermediate URLs instead of your actual content pages, slowing down discovery and indexing of new or updated pages. Fixing redirect chains on your own internal links is entirely within your control and delivers immediate, measurable improvements to ranking potential, page speed, and crawl efficiency.

See the complete Redirect chain guide for every platform and the full background.