How to fix redirect chain on Next.js (Headless)

Steps for Next.js (Headless)

1. Audit every internal `<Link href='...'>` and plain `<a href='...'>` across your components (e.g. `components/`, `app/`, `pages/`) plus any `router.push()` / `router.replace()` calls to collect all internal URLs that currently resolve through a redirect chain.
2. Centralise all internal hrefs in a single canonical-URL map file (e.g. `lib/internalLinks.ts`). Each key is the old/intermediate URL and each value is the resolved final destination URL. Pull the data from your CMS or commerce API at build time if the URLs are dynamic.
3. Create a utility hook `useCanonicalHref` (or a pure helper `resolveHref`) that looks up any given href in the map and returns the final URL, so every component shares the same resolution logic.
4. Replace every hard-coded internal `<Link href='...'>` with `<Link href={resolveHref('/old-path')}>` and every programmatic `router.push('/old-path')` with `router.push(resolveHref('/old-path'))`. Do the same for `<a href='...'>` anchors.
5. In `next.config.js`, audit the `redirects()` array: any redirect whose `source` is still referenced by an internal link should be removed once all internal links are updated, preventing the chain from being re-introduced.
6. Run `next build` and use a crawler (e.g. Screaming Frog or a custom script using `fetch` with `redirect: 'manual'`) against the build output to verify that no internal link returns a 3xx status code before deploying.

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.