Too Many Redirects: The Loop Your Visitors Are Stuck In

You type in your own web address and the browser refuses to load it. "This page isn't working," it says. "Your site redirected you too many times." Your visitors are getting the same wall. The site is not exactly down, it is stuck in a loop, bouncing every visitor back and forth between two addresses until the browser gives up. Here is how that loop happens and how it gets untangled.

What a Redirect Is, and How It Becomes a Loop

A redirect is a forwarding rule: anyone asking for address A gets sent to address B. Sites use them constantly and mostly they are good, sending old pages to new ones, or sending the plain version of your address to the secure one. A loop happens when the rules disagree. Rule one says A goes to B. Rule two says B goes to A. The visitor bounces between them twenty times in a blink, the browser calls it ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS, and nobody gets in.

The Classic Conflict: www and HTTPS Rules

The most common loop I untangle involves your address itself. Your site can live at the version with www in front, or without it, and over plain HTTP or secure HTTPS, which makes four combinations. If your hosting settings point one way, your site settings point another, and a plugin has an opinion of its own, the rules can point at each other in a circle.

This often appears right after a site gets an SSL certificate and someone turns on "force HTTPS" in two places at once. It is also a close relative of the warning I covered in why your site says Not Secure, since the two fixes touch the same settings.

Plugins, CDNs and Conflicting Chefs

Security plugins, caching plugins and redirect plugins all write forwarding rules, and so does a CDN, the delivery network many sites run through. Any two of them can disagree. The site worked yesterday, an update or a settings change happened, and now the rules conflict.

The diagnostic habit that matters here is changing one thing at a time. Turn off one rule, clear the cache, test in a private browser window. Repeat. People get in trouble when they flip five switches at once and the loop stops, but nobody knows which switch mattered, so it comes back next month.

The Sneaky Version: The Admin Cookie Loop

There is a special flavor of this problem that only locks out the owner. The public site loads fine, but logging into the WordPress admin bounces you back to the login page forever. That is usually a cookie or session problem, sometimes tied to the same HTTPS mismatch, where the login is set on one version of the address and checked on another. It feels like a password problem. It almost never is.

How the Loop Gets Found

You follow the bounce. There are simple tools that show the chain: this address sent you here, which sent you here, which sent you back to the start. Once you can see the chain, the conflicting rule is usually obvious, and the fix is deleting or correcting one rule, not rebuilding anything. My overview of website error messages in plain English shows how this one reads next to the numbered errors, and my website error help page covers the order I work through a site that visitors cannot reach.

Redirect loops are a satisfying live fix, because you can watch it happen. On a screen share we trace the bounce together, find the rule that points the wrong way, correct it, and then you type your own address and watch your site load like it should.