# Website Status Checker

> Check whether a website is up — or trace where a link goes. Get HTTP status, response time, every redirect hop and the final URL.

Canonical: https://host-tools.com/tools/website-status/

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## What this tool does

Enter a domain or URL to check whether a website is responding — or paste a link
to trace where it actually goes. The check runs server-side (so it behaves the
same from any network) and reports:

- the final HTTP status code,
- the response time,
- every step of the redirect chain, numbered, and
- the final URL after all redirects.

## Redirect chains

A single link can pass through several URLs before reaching its destination. This
tool follows up to 10 of them and shows each one, so you can see exactly where a
shortened link, an old URL or an affiliate link ends up.

It follows three kinds of redirect:

| Kind | What it looks like |
| --- | --- |
| HTTP | A `3xx` status with a `Location` header (`301`, `302`, `307`…) |
| Meta refresh | `<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=…">` in the HTML |
| JavaScript | `location.href = '…'`, `location.replace('…')` and similar |

If the chain comes back to a URL it already visited, the tool stops and tells you
it found a loop instead of following it forever.

## Checking what a crawler sees

Under **Advanced options** you can choose which `User-Agent` the check sends. Pick
**Googlebot** to see whether your site serves Google a different page than it
serves a browser — a common cause of pages that rank for the wrong content.

## What is an HTTP status code?

Every HTTP response carries a status code: `2xx` means success, `3xx` a redirect,
`4xx` a client error (such as `404 Not Found`) and `5xx` a server error. Seeing the
exact code lets you tell "down" from "misconfigured" at a glance.

## Privacy

The domain you check is sent to our backend because that is the only way to perform
the lookup. Queries are not stored, and results are never turned into indexable pages.

When a page redirects with a meta refresh or JavaScript, we read a small part of its
HTML (at most 64 KB) to find the target. That content is never stored and never shown
to you — only the resulting URL is reported.