How to fix redirect chain on Headless / Custom (I build in code)

Steps for Headless / Custom (I build in code)

1. Run a crawl of your production site (Screaming Frog, custom script using fetch/axios following redirects) to build a map of all internal URLs and their redirect chains; export the 'Final URL' for each.
2. Search your codebase (grep or IDE search) for each intermediate URL string and replace it with the final destination URL in all href attributes, router <Link> components, and any JSON/CMS content fields.
3. Update any redirect rules in your server config (Nginx rewrite rules, Apache .htaccess, Next.js redirects in next.config.js, Netlify _redirects, Vercel vercel.json) so that no redirect target is itself a redirect.
4. For CMS-sourced links (Contentful, Sanity, etc.), update the relevant link fields in the CMS dashboard to point to the final URL.
5. Deploy, then use curl -IL <url> or a crawler to verify each previously-chained URL now returns HTTP 200 in a single request (or at most one intentional redirect to HTTPS/www).
6. Add a CI/CD check or scheduled crawl to catch new chains before they reach production.

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.