Multiple redirects hurt?

[vtmoz]

In the process of website migrations and redesign, we create & replace new pages which will lead to multiple redirects unknowingly. Like: page A to page B & page B to page C. Will these kind of multiple redirects hurt? I would be happy to hear what happens with WordPress with this scenario in particular.

[LoganRay]

Hi,

You'll want to avoid redirect chains whenever possible. Every time a URL request hits the server, it checks your entire list of redirects, if this is happening multiple times for one URL, you're slowing down page speeds. This is much more important for mobile load times since they don't have the resources of a desktop/laptop computer, but nonetheless, something you should still avoid regardless of your mobile traffic percentage.

You can easily update these by using Screaming Frog, under the Reports menu drop-down, the second option is redirect chains. This report will export an Excel doc in which you can see all of the URLs you have that have multi-step redirects.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

As Logan has said, you want to avoid too many redirect chains, but if you are only talking about 1 or 2 hops, then the chances are you will never see any negative effect.

That said, I always try and keen these down to 1 hop so rather than having page A to page B & page B to page C, are you able to edit the redirects and then just have Page A to Page C? If you can cut out the middle hop, this would be much better.

Wordpress is going to be the same as any other site where redirects are concerned. There are also a lot of really good plugins to help with redirects, so do look into them.

-Andy

[vtmoz]

Hi Logan,

Thanks for the response. We are clear about internal redirects and removed such by replacing with original links. I mean here specific about the external links pointing to old pages of website which have been redirected multiple times. Like page A referred somewhere which is actually landing on page C via page B. In this case also, we need to cut the middle hop like page B?

Thanks

[LoganRay]

Yes, that's exactly what I'm referring to here. Rather than having Page A > Page B > Page C, you should break those out into 2 different ones: Page A > Page C, and Page B > Page C.