Are multiple redirect chains good seo practice?

[THEBOSS]

I tested my site using redirect checker.org, this is what i found:

I redirected from non www to www and from http to https two 301 redirects using wordpress plugins is this a good seo practice?

 

[Ryuzaki]

No, this a three-level redirect chain. Technically Google says "3 or less jumps" is okay. I think any more than that and they'll abandon the crawl and come back next time to finish the number of leaps.

What you want is a direct jump from any where (non-www, www, http, https) to your preferred canonical version.

So basically, let's say you want to use the https://www.domain.com version of your site. All of these others should make it there in one single redirect:

1. http://www.domain.com
2. http://domain.com
3. https://domain.com

The plugins you're using are doing a bad job. I'd ditch them unless you're using them for other redirect tracking. The problem with these is they all end up creating PHP redirects, which are slower. You want to place the redirects, on an Apache server for example, in the invisible .htaccess file.

This below is just an example, so you'll want to test it:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
# FORCE HTTP TO HTTPS WITH NON-WWW
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

I use this to send all versions to https://domain.com. I can't explain it to you. My regex skills suck and I put it together years ago with help from a friend.

If you start to 301 other pages around in the .htaccess, do them above this section and explicitly define the destination URL with the full URL including https://www or whatever you prefer. Otherwise it runs through the big chunk of code first and takes multiple leaps.

Hope this helps put you on the right track. You can always get it done with one leap and in .htaccess, which will be faster for users and googlebot, and better for SEO.

Here's an example from a site I just set up to confirm what I shared above works:

 

[THEBOSS]

@Ryuzaki, Thanks great explanation, since my website redirect to https://www.x x x.com instead of https://x x x .com mentioned in the code, does it require any modification?

I used the Redirects icon in cpanel, it seems to work. But i still don't know what type of technology it uses same slow php stuff like plugins or apache. The redirection speed looks reasonable