Full Answer

Redirect chains create two compounding risks: performance degradation and attribution loss. The performance cost is straightforward — each 301 or 302 redirect requires a full HTTP round-trip, adding latency that directly impacts page load time and, consequently, conversion rates. Research consistently shows that each additional second of load time reduces conversions by roughly 7% for e-commerce stores.

The attribution risk is less visible but equally damaging. When a URL passes through multiple redirects, each hop transforms the URL according to its own configuration. Hop one might redirect HTTP to HTTPS, preserving query parameters if the QSA flag (Apache) or $request_uri (Nginx) is correctly set. Hop two might normalise the domain from www to non-www — another configuration that must explicitly preserve query strings. Hop three might add or remove a trailing slash. If any single hop in the chain drops the query string, every UTM parameter and click identifier disappears, and the session arrives at its final destination with no attribution data.

The compounding nature of the problem is what makes it dangerous. Each redirect is typically configured by a different rule, sometimes by a different team or plugin. Testing each rule in isolation may show correct behaviour, but the chain as a whole can still fail. A caching layer, CDN, or WAF sitting between hops can introduce additional query-string handling that was never part of the original configuration.

The practical solution is to reduce the chain to a single redirect wherever possible. Consolidate HTTP-to-HTTPS, domain normalisation, and path normalisation into one rule that handles all three transformations in a single hop.