Free redirect tool
Every redirect makes visitors wait for another round trip before the real page loads. See exactly how long each hop in the chain takes, as a timing waterfall.
Cloudflare's edge always validates certificates, so this cannot skip the check. Certificate problems are reported in the result.
Sent with the first request, up to 16 KB. JSON bodies are sent as application/json, others as a form, unless you set a Content-Type header.
1 to 50. Browsers stop after 20.
Sites can redirect phones, crawlers and link preview bots differently.
Sent with every request in the chain.
No custom headers.
Enter a value to send this header. Header values are never saved.
Follow <meta http-equiv="refresh"> tags and Refresh headers found in HTML pages.
Follow simple, unconditional redirects such as location.href = "…" in page scripts.
Settings are remembered in this browser. Cookies, header values and the POST body are never saved.
A redirect is a full extra request. The browser has to look up the next host, open a connection, negotiate TLS for a new domain and wait for the server, all before it can request the page itself. One hop on the same host may take a few dozen milliseconds, while a chain through a shortener, a tracking domain and an HTTP to HTTPS rule can easily add half a second or more, especially on mobile networks.
Redirect time comes before everything else, so it adds directly to Time to First Byte and Largest Contentful Paint. Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights flag redirects on the main document for this reason.
For each hop, TrueURL measures the time from sending the request until the response headers arrive. That includes the DNS lookup and the TCP and TLS setup when a new connection is needed, plus the server's processing time, but not downloading the page body. The waterfall shows the hops in order, so the slowest one stands out.
Measurements are taken from the Cloudflare data center that runs your check, usually the one closest to you, not from your device. They show how fast each server responds, but real visitors add their own network latency on top of every hop. Repeat the run to smooth out noise: the first run may include cold DNS caches and new connections, while later runs are usually closer to the steady state.
As a rough guide, and the scale TrueURL uses to colour each hop's time:
The best optimisation is removing hops altogether. After that, answer redirects as close to the visitor as possible: a CDN or edge rule responds far faster than an application that has to start up just to send a 301.
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Read articleIt depends on the server and the distance, but each hop is a full round trip: typically tens of milliseconds for an edge redirect on the same host, and several hundred for a redirect to a new domain or from a slow application. Mobile networks add more. Measure your own chain above to find out.
TrueURL measures from a Cloudflare data center, which usually has a faster connection to the target server than your device. Your browser may also reuse connections, skip a redirect thanks to HSTS or use a cached 301. Use the numbers to compare hops, not as an exact prediction of what each visitor experiences.
The first request to a host usually includes the DNS lookup and a new TCP and TLS connection, and later hops on the same host may reuse part of that work. If a later hop is the slow one, look at what that server does to produce the redirect.
Yes, if you want reliable numbers. Single measurements vary with network conditions and server load. Repeat the run a few times and look at the typical value rather than one outlier; caches warmed up by the first run often make later runs faster.
Indirectly. Redirect time adds to Time to First Byte and Largest Contentful Paint for visitors who arrive through the redirect, and LCP is one of Google's Core Web Vitals. On large sites, slow redirects also reduce how many pages a crawler can fetch in the same time.
No. It's the time until the response headers for that hop arrived. The final page still has to download its HTML, styles, scripts and images afterwards, so redirect time is a delay on top of normal loading.
