What this check inspects
Shipwork requests your URL with redirects disabled and follows the Location header itself, recording the status and location of each hop up to the configured maximum. It counts the redirects, detects a loop when a URL repeats before a final response arrives, and reports the final status and location.
What a failure means
More than one hop is a warning: chains dilute link value and slow every visitor and crawler. A loop is an error, because the URL can never resolve. A final response of 400 or above is an error: the chain exists but never reaches a usable page.
How to fix it
- Aim for one hop from the plain or www variant to the canonical https form, not three.
- Point old URLs straight at the final destination rather than at another URL that itself redirects.
- Check for a loop whenever two systems, such as a CDN rule and a platform setting, both try to normalise the host or scheme.
- After a migration, make sure the old URL and the new URL do not redirect to each other.
A typical failure, worked through
The setupA store is reachable at example.com, www.example.com and https://example.com. The platform redirects to www, the CDN rule redirects www to the apex, and the apex redirects to https.
What the check reportsThe check reports 3 redirect hops before the final 200. Visitors wait for three round trips, and any crawler with a low hop limit stops early and never sees the page.
The pointHost and scheme normalisation belongs in one place. Pick one canonical host and one rule, and send every other spelling straight there.