ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS – How to Fix It Quickly 100%

Often, when browsing the internet, your website’s visitors may find themselves on a webpage that displays ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS. 

What does this mean?

Running and maintaining a website comes with its issues. You will probably encounter different errors and issues. 

One error that many website owners usually experience is the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error. 

This error is very confusing, and many people do not know how to resolve it. However, you do not have to panic if you see the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error on your WordPress website, as there are several ways to fix it. 

If you do not know what this error means and how you can fix it, you have come to the right place. 

This guide will explain what the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS is, what causes it, and how you can get it off your website. 

Without wasting much time, let’s get to work!

ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS Error Overview

The ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error can be confusing, especially for non-tech-savvies and those who have not encountered it before. This problem does not come with a clear resolution or troubleshooting approach. 

Fortunately, there are several ways to fix it without breaking a sweat. To fix this issue, all you need is the right tools and a little patience.

What Is ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error?

The ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS explains itself. It means your website is experiencing too many redirects–a redirect loop. 

When you see this error on your site, it means that something is causing too many redirects and has sent your site into an unending redirection loop.

So this means that your server is not pointing in the right direction, and the browser cannot find the location of your site. The server is directing the browser to a particular location. 

And on getting there, the browser is getting another instruction to look for the website in its original location. 

As a result, this creates the infinite redirect loop that gets your site stocked at that error page. 

Several things can cause this issue, ranging from plugins to cookies. Regardless of what the cause is, there are ways you can fix this issue and get your site back to normal.

Google Chrome

That is how the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error looks on the Google Chrome browser. The ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS chrome error is also straightforward to fix, and we will show you how to fix it in this guide.

Mozilla Firefox

Almost every browser has its unique way of displaying the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error. 

Mozilla Firefox, one of the most popular web browsers globally, displays this error message as “The page isn’t redirecting properly.” A quick ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS fix can get this error out of your site in no time.

Microsoft Edge

The ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS edge error message is also different. The error on Microsoft Edge reads, “This page isn’t working.” Fortunately, the solution to this issue is like the solutions of the other browsers.

Safari

The Safari browser also has its way of displaying this error. The ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS Safari error reads, “Safari Can’t Open the Page.”

“Too many redirects occurred trying to open “thewebsite.com.” This might occur if you open a page that is redirected to open another page, which is then redirected to open the original page.”

Android

On the Android OS, using the Chrome browser, the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error message shows as “This webpage has a redirect loop.” Like the other browsers, the solution to this issue is also simple.

Why Are You Getting ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS Error in WordPress?

So why do you see ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS in your WordPress site? There are a couple of probable causes for this problem, one of which is an SEO plugin. 

A redirect is a handy tool for websites, as you can use it as a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy or allow users to access a site with a direct URL.

For instance, you have a highly relevant site, but rather than changing the content; you would want to send your visitors to a new page; that is where redirect comes in. 

With this tool, you can automatically redirect people to your new website or page without asking them to click a link or enter a different URL in their address bar.

Hence, the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error results from misconfiguration in the redirection of your site. 

When this happens, the browser is confused and redirects the user to an unknown destination or other URLs. And when the browser gets confused and does not know or understand which URL to use, it will get stuck in an infinite loop and show the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error.

Other reasons for the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error includes:

• Conflicting WordPress plugins setting
• Inappropriate server settings
• WordPress settings misconfiguration
• SSL/TLS certificate misconfiguration
• Improper migration from one site or domain to another
• Hosting several sites on the same server
• Third-party services complications such as CDNs

How to Determine the Nature of a Redirect Loop

Since a wide range of factors can cause this issue, finding out the actual cause can help you resolve it much faster. 

There are also several ways of determining the nature of a redirect loop, but one of the easiest and quickest ways to do that is to use a redirect checker. 

We highly recommend the SerpWorx, as it is one of the most popular and effective redirect checkers out there.

This platform is straightforward to use; all you have to do is enter the URL of your website into the search bar provided and click on the “Check Redirects” tab. It will show you a result of the number of active redirects on your website.

You can also use this free Redirect Checker tool. It is a free online tool, and it will provide you with enough analysis of your WordPress website. 

Likewise, Chrome also has an extension called Redirect Path that you can use to check for redirections on your website.

How to Fix ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS Error?

The ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS looks a bit complicated, especially when you are seeing it for the first time. 

However, it is one of the most straightforward errors to fix on a website. This problem does not have only one solution; there are several ways you can get this error off your website. 

So in this section, we will walk you through the eight different methods of solving this issue. Most of the methods in this article are simple and straightforward, which means you do not need to be tech-savvy to apply them.

1. Clear & Delete WordPress Site Cache

One of the simplest and quickest ways to resolve this issue is to clear and delete the WordPress site cache. This process is also known as purging your WP cache. 

A cache is a set of data stored on a browser or a website’s server that makes the website load much faster. If some of the cached information of a website is not correct or out of date, a redirect loop error might occur.

Hence, you should clear the cache on your web browser and your WordPress server. However, if your website is in an infinite redirect loop, you might not be able to access your WP admin dashboard. 

If this is your case, you can still clear your WP cache using the visual interface in your web hosting control panel. Many WordPress hosts also have a control panel tool you can use to clear your WP website cache.

Those using third-party reverse-proxy services like Sucuri or Cloudflare would also benefit from clearing the cache of their website on their side. 

To clear the cache on Cloudflare, login into your dashboard, click on the “Catching” tab, and click “Purge Everything.” While Sucuri users should also log in to their dashboard, click on the “performance” button, and click on “Clear Cache.” 

After clearing your WordPress site cache, revisit your website to see if the issue has been resolved. You can also use some of the best WordPress cache plugins, such as Super Cache WP, to clear the cache of your WordPress site.

2. Clear & Delete Browser Cache & Cookies

If clearing and deleting your WordPress site cache does not fix the issue, consider clearing and deleting the cache and cookies stored on your browser. 

However, you might want to check if your browser cache is the cause of this problem. To do this, you should use another browser to access your website or put your browser in incognito mode. 

If you do not longer see the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error, then you should clear your browser cache.

Caches and cookies are sorts of saved data that your browser uses to load sites much faster. Whenever a website takes a long time to load, one of the quickest solutions should be deleting your browser cookies. 

The process of clearing cache stored in a browser differs from one browser to another. Here is the process of clearing cache and cookies for two of the most popular web browsers.

1. Clearing Browser Cache and Cookies for Google Chrome

Here are the steps to clearing your cookies and cache on your Google Chrome browser:

• Click on the three dots at the top-right corner of your browser.
• Click on History or press “CTRL H” on any windows on the browser.
• When your history tab opens, click on “Clear browsing data” on the left corner of the screen.
• A new window will pop up, and you will see two tabs – Basic and Advanced. Click on the Advanced tab.
• On clicking on the “Advanced” tab, check the “Cookies and other site data” and “Cache images and file” boxes and click “Clear data.”
• That is all for chrome browsers.

The process is the same for other web browsers using the Google Chrome engine, such as the Brave Browser. You can use the same approach to clear your cookies and caches.

2. Clearing Browser Cache and Cookies for Mozilla Firefox

• For Mozilla Firefox, go to the top-right corner and click on the three small dots.
• Scroll down and select “Options.”
• In the menu, click on the “Clear data” option.
• Next, select the “Cookies and Cache” option and hit the “Clear” button.

After clearing your caches and cookies on your browser, refresh your website to see if the problem is fixed. If you are still experiencing the same issue, try our next solution.

3. Review Your WordPress URL Settings

The configuration of WordPress makes it possible for you to power your root domain from a subdirectory. For example, you can install WordPress in a subdirectory ABC.com/wordpress and still use it as the root domain. 

This approach helps to prevent the issue of littering the root directory of your server. So checking your WordPress URL settings is very important, as a misconfiguration can cause the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error. 

To review your WordPress URL settings, go to Settings in your WordPress admin dashboard, click on the “General” panel, and enter the URL of your Site Address and URL of your WordPress Address.

The URL of your site is the address that users type in their browsers to access your site. The WordPress URL is the location where all your WordPress files are stored. Only the admins and those with backend access can access the WordPress URL.

For most WP websites, these two addresses should be the same. If they are not identical when they should be, an error is bound to occur. Hence, you should check them properly to make sure they are the same. 

Mistakes happen, and there might be some differences between the two URLs. If you check and they are not the same, you can fix it by going to your WP admin dashboard and editing the URL fields. Edit both fields to be identical. 

Similarly, you should pay close attention to the domain name, the www at the beginning, and HTTPS vs. HTTP. It would help if you also made sure there are no white spaces at the end of each address.

Sometimes, you might not be able to access the control panel and change the URL fields. If this is your case, you can make the necessary changes by editing the wp-config.php file. Here are the steps to edit your wp-config.php file:

• Open your file manager.
• Locate and open the folder containing your WP files.
• Locate your wp-config.php file, right-click on it, and choose edit URL.
• Add the addresses for both ‘WP_SITEURL’ and ‘WP_HOME’ and make sure both addresses are the same.
• Save the change – click on “Save” and hit the “Yes” button in the command prompt that will pop up.

You should refresh your website after making the changes to check if the issue is still there.

4. Temporarily Disable & Reactivate WordPress Plugins

Sometimes, your WordPress plugins can interfere with how the redirection rules of your site or server function. And this is more likely to happen when you install any redirection plugins on your WordPress site. 

Therefore, disabling all WordPress plugins is a quick way to fix several WordPress site issues, and the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error is not an exception.

Since misconfigured WP plugins can cause redirect issues, we recommend you quickly disable all your WordPress plugins to find out if that is the cause. 

If the redirect problem is resolved after disabling your plugins, then it is evident that one or more of your plugins is responsible for the issue.

Hence, you need to figure out which plugin is causing the error. To do this, disable your plugins one after the other. You can enable and disable your WordPress plugins from the WP admin interface. 

Nevertheless, the redirect error might restrict your access to the WordPress admin dashboard. If you cannot access the admin dashboard, your next option is to access your site through SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol).

When you log in through SFTP, locate your plugins folder and rename it to something like plugins_inactive. Doing this will disable your plugins. Recheck your website. If it is functioning, you would need to restore the folder name and rename each plugin folder in the plugins folder.

Some search engine optimization plugins such as Yoast SEO Premium allows for page-by-page redirections. Hence, it would be best if you started with disabling such plugins. 

Remember, disabling any plugin will not delete the plugin or its related data. When you reactivate them, they will start functioning normally. 

Before you log in to your website through SFTP, you should backup your site. Doing this is a safety precaution to prevent any data loss.  

5. Check for Misconfigured HTTPS Settings

Misconfigured HTTPS setting is another major cause of this ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS problem. And this usually happens when someone migrates their WordPress website to HTTPS and cannot set up some things correctly or did not finish the migration process. 

Here are some tips to help prevent HTTPS misconfigurations that could cause ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS errors.

1. Avoid Forcing Your WP Site to Load over HTTPS without SSL Certificates

Forcing your WP website to load over HTTPS without installing an SSL certificate will push your website into an infinite redirection loop. 

Hence, you should avoid forcing HTTPS when you have not installed an SSL certificate on your site. Before you load your WordPress website over HTTPS, you should first install an SSL certificate.

2. Limit Your HTTPS Redirects

If you have too many HTTPS redirects, you can throw your website into an infinite redirect loop. It is always a good practice to limit the number of redirects you use on your WordPress site. 

Thanks to tools such as SerpWorx, you can check the number of redirects you have on your website with ease. This tool will show you the number of redirects your site uses, those misconfigured, and duplicate HTTPS.

3. Avoid Using SSL Plugins as Permanent Solutions

WordPress has thousands of plugins; there is almost a plugin for everything. It has free SSL plugins like the Really Simple SSL plugin, which helps in redirecting to HTTPS automatically. 

Nevertheless, it would be best not to consider using these plugins as a permanent solution, as they come with different issues such as incompatibility. 

It can serve as a temporary solution, but you should not use it for a long time. Ensure you update your hard-coded HTTP links and stop using an SSL plugin to avoid the complications that come with it.

6. Investigate for Server Issues

If you are still experiencing the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error message on your site after applying the above solutions, you should check your server configuration files. 

You need to check the files to make sure they do not contain unnecessary redirection rules. WordPress websites usually run on two major types of web servers, which are:

1. NGINX
2. Apache

If your WordPress website is running on an Apache web server, you should search the root directory of your website for the .htaccess file. 

Since you are locked out of your WordPress admin dashboard, you would need to log in through SSH or FTP.

Once you log in, rename the .htaccess file to something like .htaccess_old. You can create a new file by re-saving your site’s permalinks. 

Nevertheless, this error will not allow you to do this, which is why you have to create new content. After creating the new file, copy and paste the following lines of code in it:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

After pasting it, save it, and upload it to your server.

If your WordPress website runs on an Nginx web server, you would need a different approach to access and edit this file. 

Accessing and editing the config.php file when using Nginx is a bit tricky, as you might have to access the terminal in most cases. Hence, you might want to reach out to your hosting provider and ask them to check your config.php file to determine what is causing this issue.

7. Check for Wrong CDN or WAF Configuration

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) are third-party services used on websites. 

An example of a CDN and WAF is Cloudflare and Sucuri, respectively, and they are both reverse-proxies settings between your server and clients. 

If you are new to the configuration of reverse proxies, you might have a hard time configuring it to work with your WordPress site properly.

The reverse proxy would even be more challenging to configure if it also handles the SSL/TLS certificates of the site. 

Reverse-proxy services like Cloudflare are sometimes the cause of this ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error. 

So you are more likely to experience this error when you already have an SSL certificate installed on your site and still enable Cloudflare’s Flexible SSL option.

When you install an SSL certificate with your WP host, they might have already set up a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS for your site. If you enable Cloudflare’s Flexible SSL option, it will send all requests to your server over HTTP. When this happens, a redirect loop is bound to occur.

Fortunately, you can fix this issue by changing your Cloudflare Crypto settings to either Full (strict) or Full and not to Flexible. 

If you are using Cloudflare, you should also watch out for their forwarding URL redirection rules. You should avoid creating a redirect where the destination of the domain is the domain itself. 

When this happens, it can cause an unending redirect loop. To avoid creating an infinite redirect loop, you can use the Always Use HTTPS page rule of Cloudflare to redirect your users to HTTPS.

8. Check & Verify .HTACCESS Settings

We are sure the above solutions would have helped to resolve the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error. However, if you are still encountering this issue on your WordPress site, this is another helpful solution to try. 

As we said earlier, many things could cause this ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS chrome or ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS WordPress wp-admin error and your WP .htaccess file could be one of them.

Whenever there is an error in your WP site, it is vital to verify the .htaccess file. The .htaccess file is used to control page redirect, and it is a crucial part of the Apache server settings. 

Hence, if the file has any issues or misconfiguration, it can throw your WordPress site into a redirect loop. To check and verify if the .htaccess file is the problem, you would have to redefine it. Here’s how to do that:

• Go to your file manager ( or FTP client) to access your website’s files.
• Locate the folder containing your WordPress files.
• Find the .htaccess file amongst the list of files.
• Download the file (the downloaded file will serve as a backup).
• Right-click on the original file and open it for editing (do not alter the backup file).
• Delete every line of code in the file and reset it to the default settings. You can search for the default settings on the web or check here.
• Copy and paste the default settings and save the file.
• Upload the file back to the server.

After uploading it, refresh your website to check if the error is still there. If your website is still showing the same error after this change, you should restore the backup, as the .htaccess file is not the cause of the problem. 

However, if this fixes the issue, then you need to reconsider the .htaccess file.

Another method of doing this is disabling your .htaccess file. Open your file manager and locate your .htaccess file in your WP folder. Right-click on the file and rename it to .htaccess_old. Doing this will deactivate the file. 

Now refresh your website to see if it works properly. If it is working, you need to change the configuration of the .htaccess file and set it back to default with the above approach. 

If you are using this approach, do not forget to rename the file back to .htaccess (without the _old) and save it. This solution will fix any misconfiguration in the file that is causing the error.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Now, let’s looking some of the most commonly asked questions regarding the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error.

Wrapping Up on ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS

Overall, ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error messages can be frustrating to troubleshoot. However, it is possible to quickly fix this issue with the correct information and tools by following each step.  

It’s also vital that you remember how an HTTP redirect works so you don’t get caught in a loop again – if your site has been redirected more than five times, then there may be something wrong on your server or network. 

In this article, you have learned eight different methods of fixing the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error on your WP site. 

Here is a quick rundown of these ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS fixes:

1. Clear & delete WordPress site cache.
2. Clear & delete browser cache & cookies.
3. Review your WordPress URL settings.
4. Temporarily disable & re-activate WordPress plugins.
5. Check for misconfigured HTTPS settings.
6. Investigate for server Issues.
7. Check for a wrong CDN or WAF configuration.
8. Check & verify .HTACCESS settings.

Have we missed any? Let us know by commenting below.

If you’re still getting ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS errors after following all these steps, contact our team for help! We’ll do everything we can to track down any issues that might exist.