A URL passes through every hop, visible or not. Hopwell shows the ones the address bar does not.

Paste a shortlink, a redirect chain, or any URL. Hopwell follows every hop and reports the full chain — status codes, scheme changes, dropped parameters, and loops. This is a design prototype — the tracing backend is not yet operational.

View prototype →

How it works (intended design)

One input, one result. Paste a URL, and Hopwell follows each redirect hop until it reaches the final destination or hits a limit, reporting every intermediate step. The tracing engine is not yet built — the page below shows the planned interface.

  1. 1
    Paste any URL A shortlink, a redirect URL, a campaign link with tracking parameters — anything starting with http or https.
  2. 2
    Hopwell follows each hop Using fetch with manual redirect mode, the tool would visit every intermediate address the same way a browser does, one hop at a time.
  3. 3
    Read the chain Every hop displayed with its URL, HTTP status code, and flagged conditions — scheme downgrades, dropped query parameters, redirect loops, and chains longer than five hops.

What Hopwell detects

The middle of the chain is where the surprises live. A shortener may land somewhere legitimate while passing your URL through an insecure intermediate hop where anything on the path can read it.

Scheme downgrade — https → http mid-chain
Chain too long — more than 5 redirect hops
Redirect loop — revisits a URL already in the chain
Dropped parameters — query string changed between hops

Who uses it

Campaign managers

Verify that tracking parameters survive the entire redirect chain. A silent parameter drop means lost attribution data and broken campaign reporting.

Security researchers

Identify open redirects, insecure intermediates, and unexpected destinations. A URL that appears safe in the address bar may have passed through an http hop.

SEO specialists

Audit redirect chains for link equity loss. Multiple hops dilute PageRank and slow page load times — know exactly how many hops separate your link from its target.

Developers

Debug redirect configurations and test that your CDN, load balancer and application layer all send the right Location headers.

Free to use. No account. No data stored.

Every request is stateless — nothing is saved, synced, or stored. Paste, read the chain, leave. The tracing backend is not yet operational — this is a design prototype.

View prototype →