Redirect chain audit. Single-hop everything. Two to eight percent traffic back in 60-90 days.
Fixed-fee audit (£2,500): every chain catalogued, traced with curl, output as a CSV plus a redirect-rule diff against your current vercel.json or htaccess. Optional flatten engagement deploys the diff and adds a build-time SEO linter that refuses chains in future deploys. For sites with 500+ URLs and chain debt that Search Console is quietly flagging.
£2,500 audit · £4,500 flatten 5 + 25 working days 60-day post-deploy monitoring Build-time SEO linter included
KEY FACTS · 2026
- A redirect chain is two or more redirects in sequence (A → B → C). Each extra hop adds 150-400ms to TTFB, costs Googlebot crawl budget, and degrades INP on every navigation that traverses it. Most real-world sites have 50-500 redirect chains they do not know about.
- Two clean wins from a flatten engagement: a measurable LCP and INP improvement on every page that previously traversed a chain, and a 2-8% organic-traffic lift over 60-90 days as Googlebot consolidates link equity onto the final URL instead of leaking it through intermediate hops.
- Fixed-fee audit (£2,500): pulls every URL from Search Console + Ahrefs + sitemap, traces every redirect with curl + status code logging, outputs a CSV + vercel.json/htaccess diff. Output ships in 5 working days.
- Optional 30-day flatten engagement (£4,500 on top): I ship the redirect-rule diff, you review, we deploy together. Includes a build-time SEO linter that fails the deploy if any new chain is introduced. 60-day post-deploy monitoring on Search Console + GA4.
- Right for sites with 500+ URLs and a Search Console "Crawl stats" report showing > 5% non-200 responses. Skip this if the site is under 100 URLs (manual fix is cheaper) or has no measurable SEO traffic to protect.
WHAT THE AUDIT ACTUALLY DOES
- Full URL inventory. Pull every URL Google has ever indexed (Search Console), every URL with backlinks (Ahrefs), and every URL in your sitemap. Dedupe into one CSV. Most sites are surprised by the count.
- Trace every redirect with curl. For each URL, follow redirects with curl -ILk, log every intermediate status code, every Location header, every cookie/canonical issue along the way. The output spreadsheet shows the full chain per URL.
- Categorise the chains. Five categories. (1) Genuine chain (deploy mistake, fixable). (2) HTTPS upgrade chain (http → https → www → final, often 4 hops). (3) Trailing-slash chain (vercel/netlify default). (4) Locale-prefix chain (en/ → root). (5) Legacy CMS migration leftover. Each fixes differently.
- Output the diff. A single redirect-rule file diff against your current vercel.json / netlify.toml / htaccess / nginx.conf. Plus a build-time linter script that fails the deploy if a new chain is introduced.
- Verify with DataForSEO. Post-deploy, run a DataForSEO bulk redirect check across the same URL set. Confirm every chain is now single-hop. Output: a before/after table with TTFB measurements per URL.
- Search Console monitoring. 60-day window after deploy. Daily check on Crawl Stats and Coverage reports. Confirm the chain-rate drops and the indexed-URL count holds steady. Named owner for any regression.
TWO ENGAGEMENT SHAPES
Audit only
£2,500 · 5 working daysYou get: CSV of every chain, full curl trace per chain, redirect-rule diff against your current config (vercel.json, netlify.toml, htaccess, nginx.conf), and a build-time SEO linter script. You deploy it yourself.
Audit + flatten + monitoring
£7,000 · 30 working daysEverything above, plus: I ship the deploy (preview deploy + UAT + production merge), set up the SEO linter in your CI, run a 60-day Search Console + GA4 monitoring window with weekly check-ins, and own any regression triage during that window.
WHEN THIS IS RIGHT FOR YOU
Three signals say yes. One: your Search Console "Crawl stats" report shows more than 5% non-200 responses. Two: you have 500+ URLs and the redirect rules in your config are 200+ lines. Three: you have done one or more platform migrations in the last 3 years and the leftover redirect rules have not been cleaned up.
Three signals say no. One: sub-100 URL site, manual fix is cheaper. Two: no measurable organic traffic to protect, the SEO ROI does not justify the fee. Three: the site is being decommissioned within 6 months.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is a redirect chain audit?
A redirect chain audit catalogues every multi-hop redirect on a site, traces the path each one takes (HTTP 301, 302, 307, 308, mixed protocols, locale prefixes), and outputs a flattened single-hop redirect rule set. The deliverable is a CSV of every chain plus a diff against your existing vercel.json or htaccess that removes the intermediate hops.
Why do redirect chains hurt SEO?
Three reasons. One: every extra hop adds 150-400ms to TTFB, which Google penalises via Core Web Vitals (LCP and INP both degrade). Two: Googlebot has a finite crawl budget per site; chains spend that budget on intermediate URLs that have no content. Three: link equity from backlinks pointing at the first URL leaks slightly through each hop, even though Google denies this publicly. The combined effect on indexed-URL counts and rankings is consistently measurable.
How much does a redirect chain audit cost?
Two engagement shapes. Audit only: £2,500 fixed fee, 5 working days, delivers a CSV + redirect-rule diff. Audit + flatten + 60-day monitoring: £7,000 total (£2,500 audit + £4,500 flatten), 30 working days, includes deployment of the diff, SEO linter to prevent regressions, and named monitoring on Search Console. Sites above 5,000 URLs add a tier; quoted on request.
What stacks do you support?
Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Workers (for header rewriting), Apache (htaccess), Nginx (conf.d), and any modern CDN (Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai). For WordPress sites the audit covers Yoast Premium redirects, Rank Math redirects, Redirection plugin tables, and theme-injected redirects all in one pass.
What if my site is on WordPress and the redirects are in a plugin?
The audit reads all four common WordPress redirect sources (Yoast Premium, Rank Math, Redirection plugin, and .htaccess from any caching plugin) plus the theme files. The output diff consolidates them into one canonical source — usually .htaccess for non-headless WP, or vercel.json if you have moved to headless. Plugin-managed redirects are easy to break during plugin updates, so consolidating into one source reduces future incident risk.
How is this different from a generic site audit?
A generic site audit (Screaming Frog, Ahrefs Site Audit) flags chains but does not produce the flattened rule set. They tell you the problem; this fixes it. The fix requires curl-tracing every chain to understand the actual path, parsing every existing redirect source, deduping conflicting rules, and producing a single CSV diff that deploys cleanly. That last step is the work most audits skip.
Will the deploy break anything?
The risk is real and bounded. Pre-deploy: I produce a regression test set of 50-100 URLs that you can hit before and after to confirm no rule was broken. The deploy itself runs in a Netlify or Vercel preview deploy first, where every URL in the test set runs through automatically before merge. Post-deploy: 48-hour heightened monitoring with rollback ready. In practice the regression rate is under 1% of rules touched, and rollback takes 2-3 minutes.
How much SEO traffic should I expect to recover?
Two to eight percent organic traffic lift over 60-90 days is the typical range for sites with measurable chain debt. The variance comes from how much link equity was previously leaking and how much of Googlebot's budget was being spent on intermediate URLs. Sites with high crawl-budget pressure (10,000+ URLs, daily content updates) see the larger end; small marketing sites see the smaller end. The audit gives you a pre-engagement estimate based on your specific URL inventory.
Can you do this as part of a bigger migration?
Yes. The redirect-chain audit fits naturally into a CMS migration or platform replatform (WordPress to Next.js, Webflow to headless, Drupal to anything). Bundle pricing applies — the chain audit drops to £1,500 when bundled into a migration project, because the URL inventory and Search Console pull is already part of the migration scope. See /wordpress-migration-agency/ for the migration framing.
When should I not bother?
Three cases. Sub-100 URL site: manual fix is cheaper than the audit fee. No measurable organic traffic to protect: the SEO ROI does not justify the fix. Site is being decommissioned within 6 months: redirect tech debt does not compound enough in that window. Otherwise, redirect-chain debt compounds quietly and the longer it sits the more it costs to clean up.
WHAT THE FIRST 48 HOURS LOOK LIKE
Book a 30-minute scoping call. Bring a Search Console screenshot showing Crawl Stats from the last 90 days, your current sitemap URL, and the rough URL count for the site. By the end of the call I will have a chain-density estimate for your specific URL inventory and a fixed quote. If audit-only is the right shape we will skip the flatten engagement and you save the £4,500.