301 Moved Permanently

What 301 means

The canonical redirect for URL changes: HTTP to HTTPS, www to apex, old paths to new ones. Browsers cache it, and search engines transfer ranking signals to the target.

Because it is cached aggressively, a wrong 301 is painful to undo. Test with a 302 first if you are not sure, then switch. For POST requests most clients change the method to GET on a 301; use 308 to preserve the method.

Common causes

• A deliberate redirect rule in the web server, CDN or application.
• Trailing-slash or case normalisation.

How to fix it

• Update links to point straight at the final URL to avoid redirect chains.
• Check for loops: a 301 that redirects to itself shows as ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.

What it looks like

A typical response:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://example.com/new-path
Cache-Control: max-age=31536000

The same event in an nginx access log (the status is the number after the request line):

203.0.113.7 - - [10/Sep/2026:10:12:01 +0000] "GET /old-page HTTP/1.1" 301 153 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"

Check it with curl

-i prints the status line and headers, and -w '%{http_code}' prints only the number, which is handy in scripts and health checks. Replace the URL with yours:

curl -i -L --max-redirs 5 https://example.com/old-path

Compare what curl sees with what the browser sees. A different status from the same URL usually means a cache, a CDN edge or a cookie is in the way.

Investigating a run of 301s? Paste the log excerpt into Log Share to get line numbers, highlighting and an expiring link for whoever is on call with you.

Related status codes

• 302Found: A temporary redirect; clients should keep using the original URL in future.
• 307Temporary Redirect: A temporary redirect that preserves the request method and body.
• 308Permanent Redirect: A permanent redirect that preserves the request method and body.

FAQ