Q: A chain of 4 redirects per URL — was flattening them actually worth the effort?

Q: A chain of 4 redirects per URL — was flattening them actually worth the effort?

This comes up a lot, so here's a real one.

Short answer: yes, and faster than you'd expect.

Long answer: an e-commerce site I helped had old-domain → www → https → final-slug, so every link hit four hops. We mapped the original entry URLs straight to the final destination — one 301 each. Crawl stats in Google Search Console (GSC, Google's free dashboard) showed average fetch time drop from 1.9s to 0.6s within two weeks. Pages crawled per day went 4,100 → 7,800 because Google wasn't burning budget on hops. Indexed product pages recovered to pre-move levels in 19 days instead of the projected 6 weeks.

The win wasn't ranking magic — it was Google re-discovering everything sooner.

Next step: export your redirects, find any URL that 301s to another 301, and point the first hop directly at the final 200 page.