How to fix redirect chain on WooCommerce

Steps for WooCommerce

1. Install and run Screaming Frog or Sitebulb against your WordPress site; export the 'Redirect Chains' report to identify every internal link that goes through multiple hops.
2. For links inside posts, pages, or product descriptions: go to wp-admin → Posts / Pages / Products, open each affected entry in the Block Editor or Classic Editor, locate the linked text, click the link, and replace the href with the final 200-OK URL.
3. For navigation menu links: go to Appearance → Menus, expand the menu item whose URL is chained, replace the URL field with the final destination, and save the menu.
4. For links inside theme template files (header.php, footer.php, functions.php, or page templates): use Appearance → Theme File Editor (or edit via FTP/SFTP) to find and update the hard-coded href values.
5. Review any redirect plugin (Redirection, Safe Redirect Manager, Yoast SEO redirects) to ensure no redirect entry points to another redirect; update the target to the true final URL.
6. Flush any caching plugin (WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket) after saving changes, then re-crawl to verify.

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.