If you’re in the process of a large site migration, correcting a large number of crawl errors, or simply maintaining your site from an SEO perspective then at some stage you’ll need to test redirects and a 301 redirect checker is a must.
Need a 301 redirect checker?
You can easily test your proposed permanent redirects using my free Google Sheets template and 301 redirect checker.
If you’re in a hurry, here’s a quick TL;DR:
- Download this free Google Sheet
- List your URLs that require a redirect
- Add in the proposed final destinations for those URLs
- Re-crawl the site
- Review the current redirects within the sheet and update as appropriate
This will quickly tell you whether the redirect you planned is correctly in place.
How to use the 301 Redirect checker template
This isn’t a life changing tool or spreadsheet – it just uses a very basic VLOOKUP and CONCATENATE to pull data from various tabs.
Take the following steps to use the 301 redirect checker sheet:
- Make a copy of the Google Sheet template
- List the URLs that require a 301 redirect in [Pre Check Data – Cell A4]
- Add in the proposed redirect destination URL in [Pre Check Data – Cell C4]
- Add the redirects to the staging or development site and re-crawl
- Paste in the tested URLs and the current redirect URL in [Post Check Data]
- The 301 redirect checker will return the results in [Redirect Test Results]
You can get a copy of the sheet here.