Published on January 31, 2022 by Kevin Graham
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When you’re managing your own website, you’re bound to come across some glitches and errors. While some of them can get annoying, it’s kind of part of the fun of running a website. The issue is a bother, but once you fix it, don’t you feel good about yourself? Like, I wish my high school computer science teacher could see me now, sort of good.
The error ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS is one of the common error codes that can appear on your WordPress website. It usually happens after problematic recent changes, a misconfiguration on the server, or incompatibilities in the settings.
In any case – don’t worry! We’ll show you how to fix ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS in WordPress, and once you fix this problem, you’ll be feeling good about your web skills in no time.
The ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error is pretty self-explanatory – it’s an issue of too many redirects.
For instance, URL A leads to URL B, which leads to URL C, which leads back to URL A, which leads to URL B, which leads to URL C, and – you see the problem – it goes on in an infinite redirection loop.
So the browser – rather than pointlessly, endlessly proceeding through the loop – informs the site visitor that there’s an issue. ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS means that the website is in a redirection loop due to some misconfiguration.
Basically, the cause of the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS issue is misconfiguration related to the website. From WordPress’ SEO-friendly URL structure and various SEO plugins that use the redirect functionality, to the WordPress SSL and cache plugins which also use redirects, the chances of a misconfiguration happening somewhere along the way aren’t too slim.
This means that the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS may be caused by:
But don’t worry about all this! We’ll take you through the process of troubleshooting and fixing the problem step by step.
You may get different error messages, depending on which browser you’re using. Essentially, they’re all dealing with the same issue, and are fixed in the same way.
Chrome is our go-to example. The page will say:
“This page isn’t working.”
“www.domain.com redirected you too many times.”
“Try clearing your cookies.*”
“ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS”
OR
“This webpage has a redirect loop problem.”
It’s pretty clear what the issue is.
Microsoft Edge is the only browser apart from Chrome that will show the same exact error code below the error message. This is what the page will show:
“This page isn’t working right now.”
“ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.”
If you’re using Mozilla Firefox, the error message will read:
“The page isn’t redirecting properly.”
“An error occurred during a connection to www.domain.com.
Safari will say:
“Safari Can’t Open the Page”
“Too many redirects occurred trying to open “www.domain.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.”
Now, we’ve conveniently placed a * next to two lines – one in the Chrome window and one in the Mozilla window to draw your attention to the first and easiest possible solution to the issue – cookies.
Let’s look at several simple solutions to the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error.
“Try Clearing Your Cookies” is advice straight out of the error message that Chrome will show. Mozilla suggests the same. Clearing your cookies is the easiest and simplest way to try to get the website to work again. This method can work both on your own website and on another website that you’re just visiting.
Cookies basically save the login status and various other settings on sites that you frequent. Refreshing this information, by clearing the cookies, can solve the redirect issue.
Here’s how to clear your cookies:
Now, you can refresh the page where the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error had appeared.
If you want to get rid of all your cookies for all your sites, once you’ve selected Advanced, go to Clear browsing data, and then tick the box only next to cookies, like so:
And click on Clear data.
Again, refresh the website that displays the error code. Did it work? Hopefully. If not, let’s see what you can try next.
We will go over clearing all kinds of caches, but let’s start with the easiest – your browser cache.
Before clearing your browser cache (you may, after all, have reasons for being attached to it), there’s an easy way to first check if it’s the browser cache indeed that’s causing the issue.
To do this, open Chrome in Incognito mode by clicking on the Customize and control Google Chrome button and selecting New Incognito Window, or simply pressing SHIFT+CTRL+N.
Incognito travels light – without the baggage of the browser cache – so if the website opened without the error message, you need to clear your browser cache.
To do this, you pretty much need to follow similar steps as the ones we showed for clearing all cookies. Or take this shortcut:
Customize and control Google Chrome > More Tools > Clear browsing data.
Check the box next to Cached images and files, and select Clear data.
If your browser cache wasn’t causing the problem, clearing the cache on your WordPress site is the next thing you should try. (Keep in mind that you’ll only be able to do this if you can access your WordPress admin page. If the redirect loop is happening on the admin page itself, skip to the next solution.)
The best way to clear your WordPress cache is by using a caching plugin. The most popular options are W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.
If you don’t have a caching plugin, install one! A caching plugin can help with your search engine and performance optimizations (SEO & WPO).
We’ll use WP Super Cache as an example. To clear your WordPress caching:
From your WordPress admin dashboard, select Settings > WP Super Cache.
The WP Super Cache page will open. Click on Delete Cache to clear the cache on your WordPress site. Then, reload the site and see if the problem was fixed.
If you can’t clear your WordPress site cache from the admin board because it’s fallen prey to the dreaded loop, you can clear your cache directly from your server. And mind you, server cache is not infrequently the culprit of the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error.
If your host has server-side caching separate to WordPress caching, access the control panel provided by your host, and clear the website cache directly from there.
Refresh the page, and see if you can now access the site.
Are you using a proxy to improve your website’s security and performance? That’s smart! A part of a proxy’s job is to have its own caching net. So if you’re using a proxy, you’ll need to clear its cache too, in order to fix the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS issue.
The two most popular proxies are Cloudflare and Sucuri.
Clear your cache on Sucuri via the Sucuri dashboard
If you’re using Sucuri, log in through their website. Then go to Performance > Clear Cache.
You can also clear your cache on Cloudflare by logging into their dashboard
To clear your cache on Cloudflare, login to their website, select Caching > Purge Everything.
After clearing the cache on either proxy, try to open the website that displayed the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error and see if you can open it now!
One of the most common causes of the redirect loop is an inconsistency with your WordPress address URL or site address URL. But let’s take it one step at a time.
When you buy a domain from your host, you choose the URL address of your website. Generally, hosts will give you the option of adding the www prefix to the domain name or not. So for instance, your domain may be http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com.
When you begin setting up your page on WordPress, you go to Settings > General, and write the domain name in the two URL lines: WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL).
If you accidentally wrote the URL into WordPress with the www prefix, but specified the domain name without the www prefix when you got it from your host, this inconsistency between the URL’s is causing the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error. The same is true of the opposite – if you originally purchased the domain name with www but wrote it without www into WordPress.
So what happens in such a case, is that a visitor comes to http://domain.com, but is then redirected by the server to http://www.domain.com, which will redirect them back to http://domain.com, since that’s what you’ve written into the WordPress URL line, and so the loop begins, resulting in the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error.
To fix this from WordPress, go to Settings > General, and change the WordPress and Site Address URLs.
Check if the URL written into your WordPress General Settings is correct
If you think that you’ve written the wrong domain, and it’s missing a www or shouldn’t have a www, just rewrite the correct address into the WordPress Address and Site Address URLs.
Note: Make sure to add the slash at the end of your URL: http://domain.com/
You may not be able to access your WordPress dashboard if the loop has “infected” your admin page.
To change the site URL without access to the admin dashboard:
define('WP_HOME','http://domain.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://domain.com');
define('WP_HOME','http://www.domain.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://www.domain.com');
If this didn’t work, the misconfiguration between the URL addresses may be on your host’s end. If you think that this is the case, contact your web host and let them know about the problem. They should look into it and get it fixed!
A lot of the time, plugins use redirection functions for various purposes. So, the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS issue may be caused by one of your plugins. But which one?
An easy first step is to think whether you recently installed a new plugin or updated an existing one. If so, this plugin is probably the culprit.
If you can access your WordPress admin dashboard, open the Plugins tab on the left, then click on Deactivate next to the guilty plugin, and refresh the site that was displaying the error to see if it worked.
If you’re not sure which plugin is responsible for the error message, disable all plugins. To do this, select Plugins and then click on Deactivate from the bulk actions menu.
Refresh the page and see if it worked. Now, you can activate your plugins one by one, and see which one causes the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS when activated. Make sure to reload your webpage after activating each plugin. Once you find the culprit, deactivate it. You can also contact the plugin developer or post a support ticket to WordPress and ask them to fix the issue.
It’s still possible to disable one – or all – of your plugins even if you can’t access the WordPress admin dashboard.
Hopefully, your host has provided you with access to your FTP server.
Now, you have two choices. If you want to only disable one plugin that you think is causing the trouble, find it in the plugins folder and rename it. So if it was called example, rename it to example_old. Refresh your website, and see if it worked.
If you’re not sure which plugin was causing the issue, proceed:
Another common cause of the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error is due to misconfiguration of the HTTPS settings. This can happen if you recently switched to HTTPS from HTTP, and the moving process either wasn’t completed properly, or something in the process wasn’t done properly.
If you migrated your site to HTTPS but you failed to install an SSL certificate, it’s likely that this is causing the redirect problem. Your WordPress site is trying to load over HTTPS and ending up into a redirection loop.
To fix this, you basically need to install an SSL certificate. Once you’ve installed a valid SSL certificate, your WordPress website will begin to work properly.
To be on the safe side though, you should also run an SSL server test, to see if all necessary SSL and TLS certificates are in order (including intermediate certificates). We recommend using Qualys, which offers free SSL server tests.
Simply enter your website domain in the bar next to Hostname and hit enter.
After a couple of minutes, Qualys will provide you with the results. It will specify certificate issues (if any), so that you can go about fixing them yourself, or asking your host for help.
In order to quickly migrate your WordPress website to HTTPS, you used one of the free SSL WordPress plugins. These plugins work by automatically redirecting your website to an HTTPS version. While this may be a nice short term solution, it doesn’t work well in the long run, and it may cause problems. (For a long term solution, we advise that you properly update your hard-coded HTTP links and get a proper, valid SSL certificate.)
The issue with free SSL plugins is that they often come with glitches and various compatibility issues. So get rid of your SSL plugin and migrate your website to HTTPS the harder – but right – way.
As we’ve already mentioned, the redirect loop may be an issue stemming from your server. Before you contact your host, there’s an easy way for you to check if the redirect code from HTTP to HTTPS was misconfigured, and fix it yourself.
To redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS on a WordPress website running on Nginx:
server
{
listen 80;
server_name domain.com www.domain.com;
return 301 https://domain.com$request_uri;
}
To redirect HTTP to HTTPS on a WordPress website running on Apache:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
For one reason or another, the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS may be caused by too many HTTPS redirects. The easiest way to check this is to run a HTTPS redirect mapper test, like this one.
Enter your URL and hit enter – the results of your website’s HTTPS redirects will be ready within seconds
If your redirects have a clean setup:
Run this test to see if there’s an issue with the way that your website’s redirects are set up.
While the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS can be frustrating, these simple solutions should help you fix the issue and get your website up and running again!
The error is most commonly caused by various misconfigurations or incompatibilities (between URLs, caches, plugins, and so on). Troubleshooting the issue step by step will help you solve the error and get a better idea of what’s happening behind the scenes of your website, and what allows it to be functional. (Yep, fumbling with code can be quite humbling!)
Keep in mind that we recommend you try the solutions one by one, as we begin with the easiest and proceed with the slightly more challenging ways of solving the ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS issue. Clearing the cache and cookies, for instance, is a go-to first solution for most browser error codes, including error messages such as Your Connection is Not Private and DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN.
If you tried everything and the problem persists, don’t shy away from contacting your web host and asking for help. They can troubleshoot the redirection loop as well, and track down the cause of ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS. If you have access to your WordPress admin dashboard, you can also leave a support ticket in the WordPress repository letting them know about your problem.
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