HTTP Header Checker

What This Checks

Enter a URL and the checker makes a request and reports what came back, following every redirect and showing each hop rather than only the destination. This is the tool for answering "what is actually happening when someone requests this page", which is a different question from what your CMS believes is happening.

Looking for H1 to H6 document structure instead? That is the Heading Structure Analyzer. This page is about HTTP response headers.

Reading the Output

1  http://acme.com/blog/old-post
   301 Moved Permanently
   location: https://acme.com/blog/old-post

2  https://acme.com/blog/old-post
   301 Moved Permanently
   location: https://acme.com/blog/new-post/

3  https://acme.com/blog/new-post/
   200 OK
   content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
   cache-control: max-age=3600, public
   content-encoding: br
   strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000
   x-robots-tag: (not set)

FINDINGS
  3 hops to reach a 200, 2 could be 1
  compression active
  HSTS present

That chain works, and it is still worth fixing. Two hops to reach the destination means every crawler and every visitor pays two extra round trips, and each hop is a place where a future change breaks the chain silently. Redirecting the plain HTTP URL straight to the final HTTPS destination collapses three requests into two.

The line worth checking on every page is x-robots-tag. It does the same job as a robots directive in the page, but at the server level, which means it can be set globally by a rule nobody remembers writing. A page that is noindexed here will not be indexed no matter what the HTML says, and because it is invisible in the page source it is one of the harder indexing problems to diagnose.

Status Codes Worth Recognising

A 301 is permanent and passes ranking signals. A 302 is temporary and is the wrong choice for a move you are not reversing, though search engines increasingly treat a long-lived 302 as permanent anyway. A 404 means the page is gone and that is a legitimate answer. A 410 says the same thing more definitively. A soft 404, meaning a page that returns 200 while displaying a not-found message, is the genuinely bad case, because crawlers keep requesting it forever.

A 200 on a URL you expected to be redirected usually means two versions of the page are live and competing with each other.

Questions