How to fix redirect chain on BigCommerce

Steps for BigCommerce

1. Crawl your store with Screaming Frog or a similar tool and export the redirect-chain report, noting chained URLs and their final destinations.
2. For links inside page content: go to Storefront → Web Pages, open each affected page, locate the linked text in the WYSIWYG editor, click the hyperlink icon, and update the URL to the final destination.
3. For navigation/header/footer links: go to Storefront → My Themes → Edit Theme (Page Builder) or edit the theme files directly. In Page Builder, click the navigation or footer widget containing the link and update the URL. In theme files (Stencil CLI), edit the relevant Handlebars template.
4. For product or category descriptions containing chained links: go to Products → View or Products → Product Categories, open the item, and edit the description field to update the link.
5. Review any existing redirects under Storefront → 301 Redirects and correct any entry whose destination is itself a redirect rather than a final URL.
6. Re-crawl and validate that all internal links now resolve directly to 200 OK pages.

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.