Help Centre

A redirect chain is the sequence of URLs a link passes through before it arrives at its final destination. A short link like bit.ly/example might bounce through a tracker, a link-shortener analytics server, and two CDN layers before loading the page.

Most tools only tell you where you ended up. Hopcheck shows every hop so you can see what changes along the way — a query string that gets dropped, an HTTPS-to-HTTP downgrade, or a tracker you did not know was in the path. These changes matter: a lost ?ref= breaks attribution, a plaintext hop exposes the URL on the wire, and a loop means nobody can reach the page at all.

Hopcheck stops following redirects after 10 hops. This is a built-in safety limit — a redirect loop would otherwise run forever and never return a result.

When you see this message, the chain was truncated, not complete. The tool says so explicitly: a truncated chain and a complete chain are different results and must not be confused. If you need a higher limit for your use case, the planned Pro tier will support up to 25 hops. For now, check whether the 10-hop chain tells you enough or whether the loop needs fixing on your side.

The query string is the part of a URL after ?, e.g. ?ref=newsletter&utm_source=twitter. Hopcheck compares the query string at each hop against the previous one. When a parameter disappears, gets renamed, or a new one appears, it flags the hop with a warning.

This is one of the most common reasons people use Hopcheck. A marketing ?utm_source= parameter that gets stripped by a redirect means your analytics will misattribute the traffic. A ?ref= that vanishes means a referral program loses the commission. The flag tells you exactly which hop broke it.

A plaintext hop is a redirect that goes through an http:// URL (not https://). Even if the chain starts and ends on HTTPS, a single HTTP hop in the middle transmits the entire URL — including query strings with tokens, session IDs, or ?ref= parameters — over an unencrypted connection.

Anyone on the same network (a coffee shop Wi-Fi, a corporate proxy, an ISP) can read that URL in plain text. Hopcheck flags every plaintext hop regardless of where it appears in the chain so you can decide whether that exposure is acceptable for your traffic.

Those errors mean our server could not reach the URL you submitted. This can happen because:

• The domain does not exist or has expired.
• The server is down or blocking our request.
• A firewall or rate limiter rejected our server's IP.
• Network conditions caused a timeout.

Hopcheck always reports its own failure when the check does not complete. We never describe a failed check as a finding about your link. If the error is a timeout, we say at which hop the timeout occurred. Try the same URL from a browser — if it works there, the redirect chain may be blocking automated requests, which is itself useful information.

No. Hopcheck does not log, store, or retain the URLs you submit. The URL is used only to perform the redirect trace, and the results are shown to you and then discarded. There are no user accounts, no history, and no saved traces.

See the full Privacy Policy — we do not set cookies, do not use analytics trackers, and do not share data with third parties (apart from the Google Fonts requests your browser makes when loading the page).