Redirects - Page Speed Best Practices

To speed up browsing between pages on your site, avoid hyperlinks to URLs that perform redirects. For example, say you had a hyperlink pointing to /news which now redirects to /updates because the page was moved. A user visiting the hyperlink would experience a significant page loading delay as the redirect was being followed. You can avoid delays like this by hyperlinking directly to the redirect destination.

Avoid loading page resources via URLs that perform redirects as redirects will slow down page loading. For example, if a CSS file was loaded using the URL example.com/styles.css that then redirects to www.example.com/styles.css, the redirect would introduce a delay when the file was fetched. This can be fixed by linking directly to the redirect destination.

When a redirect must be used, use a single redirect instead of a chain of several redirects for a faster response. For instance, a redirect chain such as http://example.com → https://example.com → https://www.example.com can be common when redirect rules haven’t been optimised. Chains of redirects add significant delays to fetching URLs while browsing and search bots may give up following long chains which can impact search rankings. You should optimise your server redirection rules to eliminate chains of redirects when it isn’t possible to eliminate redirects entirely.