The ‘Error too many redirects’ issue is a WordPress error that may be caused by a plugin or incorrect settings. In fact, it’s one of the most common errors seen by our readers and other WordPress users.
This error can even lock you out of your website, making it a bit tricky to fix. Luckily, we’ve troubleshooter the too many redirects issue multiple times, so we know exactly what to do.
In this article, we will show you how to easily fix the ‘Error too many redirects’ issue in WordPress. We will also cover how to regain access to your website and troubleshoot the error.
Expert Tip: Prefer to leave the troubleshooting to the professionals? Our WordPress Support Services can fix your error in no time and get your site back up and running. Plus, we offer one-time fixes, so you don’t need to worry about ongoing contracts.
What Causes the ‘Error Too Many Redirects’ Issue in WordPress?
‘Error too many redirects’ is caused by a misconfigured redirection issue in WordPress.
As you might already know, WordPress has an SEO-friendly URL structure feature that uses the redirect function. Similarly, many popular WordPress plugins use this feature to set up temporary redirects, create permanent 301 redirects, and fix 404 errors.
If you are using a plugin to fix the SSL insecure content issue or a WordPress caching plugin, then it may also affect redirects and cause the ‘too many redirects’ error.
This is how the ‘ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS’ message looks in Google Chrome.
However, this error doesn’t tell you what is causing the conflict and forcing the redirect loop in WordPress.
This is how the error looks in Firefox with the message ‘The page isn’t redirecting properly’.
That being said, let’s take a look at how to fix the error too many redirects issue in WordPress.
We will walk you through step-by-step troubleshooting, getting access to your WordPress site, and preventing the error from happening again.
Video Tutorial
If you’d prefer written instructions, then just keep reading.
1. Clear Browser Cookies and Cache
A common cause of the error could be your web browser cookies. Try accessing your website using a different web browser, like Firefox, Safari, Opera, or Microsoft Edge.
If you are able to access your website normally using a different browser, then you need to clear browser cookies and cache in your regular browser.
We have a detailed guide on how to clear your browser cache in all major browsers that will help you do that.
On the other hand, if changing the browser doesn’t fix the issue, then you can move on to the next step.
2. Deactivate All WordPress Plugins
The most common cause of the WordPress redirect loops or ‘ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS’ is a plugin conflict. A WordPress plugin trying to set up a redirect in a way that conflicts with the default WordPress redirects can cause this error message.
To fix this, you need to deactivate all WordPress plugins on your website. Normally, you can just go to the Plugins » All Plugins page in the WordPress admin area and deactivate plugins from there.
However, we are assuming that due to the redirect error, you may be unable to access the WordPress admin area.
In that case, you will need to deactivate WordPress plugins using an FTP client like FileZilla or the File Manager app in your WordPress hosting control panel.
Simply connect to your website using an FTP client and go to the /wp-content/ folder.
There you will find the plugins folder, which you need to rename to ‘plugins.deactivate’.
Doing this will deactivate all the WordPress plugins on your site.
Basically, WordPress looks for a folder called plugins to load the plugin files. When it does not find the folder, it automatically disables the active plugins in the database.
Now, you can try visiting your WordPress website. If you are able to log in to your WordPress admin area now, then this means one of the plugins was causing the error.
To figure out which plugin was the culprit, you need to switch back to the FTP client or File Manager app and rename your plugins.deactivate folder back to ‘plugins’.
After that, switch to the WordPress admin area of your website and go to the Plugins » All Plugins page. From here, you can activate your plugins one by one and then visit your website to see if you can reproduce the error.
Once you find the plugin that is causing the error, you can find an alternative to that plugin or report the issue to the plugin’s WordPress support forum.
3. Fix WordPress URLs
Another major cause of this error is a misconfiguration in WordPress URL settings. Normally, you can view these options on the Settings » General page.
For most websites, the URLs in the WordPress Address and Site Address fields must be the same. However, some users may end up using ‘www’ in one URL and a non-www URL in the other.
Since you might not have access to the WordPress admin area, you may need to fix the WordPress URLs using an FTP client or the File Manager app.
Simply connect to your WordPress site using an FTP client and go to /wp-content/themes/your-theme-folder/.
From here, you need to find the functions.php file and edit it using a plain text editor like Notepad or TextEdit.
Next, you need to add the following code at the bottom:
update_option( 'siteurl', 'https://example.com' );
update_option( 'home', 'https://example.com' );
Don’t forget to replace ‘https://example.com’ with your own site URLs. You can now save your changes and upload the file back to your website.
After that, try visiting your website to see if this resolves the error.
For more methods, see our tutorial on how to easily change WordPress URLs.
4. Reset WordPress .htaccess File
The .htaccess file is a special file that is used by the website server to manage redirects and other server settings. WordPress also uses this file for SEO-friendly URLs and other redirects.
Sometimes, WordPress plugins may make changes to your website’s .htaccess file, which can trigger this error. It is also possible that deactivating a plugin will not remove those changes from your .htaccess file.
In that case, you will need to manually reset your WordPress .htaccess file.
Again, you will need to access your website using an FTP client or the File Manager app in your hosting dashboard. Once connected, you will see the .htaccess file in the root folder of your website.
Note: If you cannot find your .htaccess file, then see our guide on how to find .htaccess file in WordPress.
First, you need to download a copy of your .htaccess file to your computer as a backup. After that, you can go ahead and delete the file from your website.
You can now try visiting your WordPress blog. If everything works normally, then this means your .htaccess file was causing the redirect error.
Now, since we deleted the .htaccess file, you will need to recreate it. Normally, your WordPress website can do it on its own. To make sure, just go to Settings » Permalinks page and click on the ‘Save changes’ button at the bottom.
5. Preventing Error Too Many Redirects in WordPress
Hopefully, the steps we just covered have fixed the redirect issue on your website. If they did not fix the problem, then you may need to talk to your WordPress hosting company to make sure that there isn’t a server issue.
Once they fix the issue on your site, you should also be able to figure out what caused it.
If it was a plugin, then you need to report the issue to the plugin’s support forum. See our guide on how to ask for WordPress support. However, if you are unable to get help, then you can always find an alternative plugin that does the same thing.
If the error was caused by a WordPress site misconfiguration, then you can make a note of it and ensure that your site settings are properly set up.
For more tips, see our detailed tutorial on how to troubleshoot WordPress issues on your own like a total WordPress pro.
We hope this article helped you resolve the ‘error too many redirects’ issue on your website. You may also want to bookmark our ultimate handbook of common WordPress errors and see how to contact WordPress support.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
David Najman
Hi,
I had this error on the product tag page. I tried all the possible repairs mantioned above with no luck.
Finally, I had to rename slug for tags not to be numbers, eg. 2016, so I renamed it to r2016 and it started to work!
It must have been caused by some wordpress update, because it have been working few years before with tags named as numbers.
WPBeginner Support
Thanks for sharing what worked for you, if your product page is created by a plugin you may want to try reaching out to the plugin’s support to let them know about that issue
Admin
Yavan Kumar
Hi,
My whole website is running properly, but the homepage is redirected too many times and same issue with the wp-admin page too. I tried all the methods you mentioned but nothing worked for me.
Please advice me if there is any another solution for that.
Thanks in advance…
WPBeginner Support
If none of the methods from the article worked, you would want to reach out to your hosting provider for them to see if there are any issues they can see on their end.
Admin
John Zoetebier
My web site is a Bitnami Wordpress deployment on Google Cloud Platform.
When I use:
define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http:/example.cloud’);
the home page gets redirected to itself and browsers error message.
I now use the original Bitnami setting and it works great !
define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://’ . $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’] . ‘/’);
WPBeginner Support
You are missing a slash next to your http in the first define statement but thank you for sharing your workaround.
Admin
Chad
I had to desactivate a plugin and it worked back fine. I identified the plugin to desactivate by looking into my URL where I was getting a redirect error. The plugin name was written there.
WPBeginner Support
Thanks for sharing how you found the error for others trying to solve this problem
Admin
Nirav Patel
Thanks you bro for information of wp error
WPBeginner Support
Glad our article could help
Admin
irga
yeah, you know,,, i searching for it,,,,, and then mys wordpress site working again, thanksfull
Rahul
Thans buddy , really helps
Josh
I’ve tried all the steps here with no luck today. Luckily my website is functioning ok but I can’t log into the wp-admin dashboard for anything.
What are the other options? There must be other ways I can figure out what’s causing it?
Deby
I’m having the same. My site works fine for visitors, but I only get the redirect error for the backend, my WP dashboard.
It’s a new site and I don’t even have any plugins installed yet. I’m stumped.
Bryant Thomas
Holy Cow That worked, I’ve done many websites migrations and never ran into this issue. Thank you the define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://example.com’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://example.com’); worked with the www.
Rutvi Trivedi
Hi, My problem is when I go to my site’s dashboard(/wp-admin) it is giving me this error I tried this solution and unfortunately it is not working. Please help me to solve this error.
Shakeane
I just want to say thank you so much for sharing this knowledge, you wouldn’t understand how much this has helped me, something as minor is adding www or leaving the forward slash at the end has caused so many headaches, thank you so much.
Marc
Awesome! Only took 5 minutes and fixed!!!
hassan
dear sir,
i have huge data on my website i change my address directly from http://www.example.com to example.com i remove www from wp-confiq and phpmyadmin without doing the above procedure, now i update all the plugin and theme everything is fine but my theme setting is not editing when i am going to change setting of my theme the changes reverting …please help how to solve this problem i will be thankful to you
i am trying to solve this problem from three days but fail
please help
Sachin
Hi, my website is running without any error but i have this issue in backend when i open appearance>customize tab. I am unable to customize my website from backend. How can i solve it?
Adrian Daniels
Wow, this actually worked, thanks!!
Toheeb
Hi!
Thank you for your post…
I was able to solve mine changing the WP_SITEURL and WP_HOME to lowercase letters. I capitalized each word formerly for readability and as it turned out, it redirects post paginated pages.
Everything seems fine now. Thank You
Laurena
Hey, this was my problem! Thanks for your comment here.
scott
This was my problem as well.
Karla
This was my problem too! Thanks for your comment! I tried everything in the video but nothing worked.
Rudy Reteig
I made a redirect in ADDOn Domain to rid my site of a tail, “/blog”, behind my URL, appeared when launched the site. This was in my opinion automatically done, as I have two sites on the same PUBLIC_html directory. probably to avoid conflict of files with the same name of the two sites
Robin
None of these fixes worked for me. In the end it turns out I had setup a custom page rule in CloudFlare a long time ago to treat the wordpress dashboard different to the rest of the site. It had “SSL – Flexible” set which causes the error. I just set the rule to “Full” and it works fine again.
Ada
This was the fix for me. Thank you so much!
Damien
Oh God! Thank you so much
Daniel
Thanks a lot for this fix, after like 5 hours on this error, finally solved the issue. I spend more time on fixing errors than building website with wordpress. I’m tired
Simon
Thanks bro. Hours of checking .htaccess etc and its just a simple cloudflare problem.
Rares
This was the solution for me too. Thank you so much for sharing!
Jack
This fixed mine! Thanks!
Jeenie
Same here – once “Flexible” was changed to “Full” in the Cloudflare SSL settings, it worked! Phew. (Wish I saw your comment sooner!)
Nancy
Thank you soooooo much for this! It worked.
Florian
I also had the problem, so I started searching for a solution and found out that the CDN was causing that error. I switched it off and it worked again
Jennifer
Thank God I saw your reply. I thought because I had added the Yoast SEO plugin, it was causing the issues, but I had also activated CDN in my control panel and that was the problem!
Alex Jr
I deactivated all plugins, disabled the current theme, deleted .htaccess, but I’m still getting the “too many redirects” error when I try to access my wordpress site. What is causing it and how can I fix it?
Dan
Just had this happen to me on a new site I’m working on. The issue turned out that I created my child theme with spaces in the name. As soon as I renamed the child theme folder to my-child-theme it worked. I did have to go and make my child theme active again to make it work right. Hope this saves someone so grief and aggravation!
ANA
Dan, I just wanted to say THANK YOU!!!!!!!
That was my problem too, apparently. I changed the name and folder to include a dash and everything works fine.
Santiago
I’m finding that when I try to set my Permalink to Post Name I get the redirect issue. When I set it to Plain, no issues. I’ve disabled all the plugins and still the same thing.
I’m new to WP but 20+ years IT, any help would be greatly appreciated.
Damion
+1 on this and thank for for so thoroughly and generously sharing your knowledge – you saved me hours of work today.
Bilal Asghar
This is a really helpful article. I had the redirection issues with my WordPress website. I just changed my Post URLS going to Setting>Permalinks.
Ebad Ur Rehman
My site is redirected too many time in the preview of customization
other functions of theme are working fine.
please tell the solution for the problem
Sharon Booker
Thank you so much. I called my hosting service help desk twice and nothing they told me to do helped. This fixed the error.
Amit Khandelwal
I’m getting “ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS” problem only on website Home page but other pages working fine. I think plugin “Redirection” create this problem but it’s my need to keep activate this.
Please suggest.
Tenzin Nima
Thank you so much!! I have been looking for solution for whole day and finally solved it.
Thank you
maria
ive tried the first option, Settings » General and changed the url. the thing is, i accidentally put a ; instead of a . on the adress.
Now the site is all messed up and i cant even login on the admin user anymore, to change it back :/ any tips?
WPBeginner Support
Hi Maria,
You can fix this by adding this code to your WordPress site’s wp-config.php file.
define('WP_HOME','http://example.com'); define('WP_SITEURL','http://example.com');1-click Use in WordPress
Don’t forget to replace example.com with your own domain name.
Admin
Yildirim
hi,
what about https
WPBeginner Support
The code is example code, if you are using https then you would put https in the code
Em Walker
Hi, Every time I go to the WIDGET page to load my adsense ads then my page freezes up and becomes unresponsive, how can I fix this, please
Mark
Thank you that worked
Abiskar Bharati
I tried all the things mentioned in the blog but issue still persisted so I did what Jake Philips(one of the comment above) did and I found that something had changed the permalink structure setting to:
/’/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/’
I changed it back to (as the comment suggests) :
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
and then everything was working fine again…
Abhishekh Maharjan
Thank You. It worked
Cindy
When I put my link on Facebook my photo that’s on my webpage does not come up just my website name and URL. Any idea what I need to do to have a thumbnail photo?
Felix
Hi, CINDY.
That’s because you didn’t use Yoast plugin, and didn’t set the rules on Facebook tab. The issue is related to open graph protocol.
Khori Carnes
Hi. I am having a some what odd issue, i feel. My redirect issue is that when i attempt to access my wordpress admin page using my domain, it redirects me to godaddy.com. my only explanation I can come up with is that i purchased my domain name from godaddy. However i purchased my web hosting from hostgator. Regardless, i can not access my admin page for wordpress to begin establishing my new website.
Any and all help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
WPBeginner Support
Hi Khori,
You can contact GoDaddy support and they can help you point out your domain name to your hosting provider. All you need to do is go to your GoDaddy account and point Name Server settings for your domain name to HostGator.
Admin
Ralf
In my case the problem was special characters in the URL. You can’t have those with wordpress. E.g. German umlauts: ÄÖÜ – need to be converted.
Teemu
Yes and no. I succesfully ran a website with “ä” character in there for a few years. But this time this might be the reason why I’m searching help to this problem here with a website that now has the same “ä” character there also…
Don Stewart
I panicked when I could not access my website home screen (though I could the other pages). I messed around with the Settings=>General URL settings, and I saw that the same address appeared as the Wordpress URL and the website URL—which meant it was going around in circles, as you pointed out. I fiddled with that for awhile, almost locking myself out of Wordpress altogether, but then deactivated several recently installed plugins. Fixed! I’m not sure which plugin caused it—I will investigate that, by omitting the one I think is most likely and one-by-one reactivating the others, but my suggestion is to follow your article from the bottom up. Check out those recent plugins!
Jake Phillips
I had just enabled CDN and SSL in Bluehost for my WordPress site when this started happening. I found that something had changed the permalink structure setting to:
/’/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/’
I changed it back to:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
and then everything was working fine again…
Asma
Hi,
Your article is really good and may be a solution of my recent problem. But I am not a WordPress expert and not enough brave to experiment with my site, though the blog is completely built by myself.
However, I’m seeing the following things from last two days–
“This page isn’t working
m redirected you too many times.
Try clearing your cookies.
ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS”
I’ve tried many times after clearing cookies, still, I can’t log into my site.
Can you please give a solution?
WPBeginner Support
Hi Asma,
If you have tried steps mentioned above, then you can try our WordPress troubleshooting guide. It will help you figure out what’s causing the issue and how to fix it.
Admin
Adeshola
My problem seemed to be a mixture of plugins and wp-config.php. After deactivating my plugins, I was able to access my site but not my wp-admin area. I fixed this by updating my wp-config with the codes provided above. However, they worked only after I put them before the “/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */” line. This was something you guys didn’t include in your tutorial but I found somewhere else. So thanks for everything. My site works now.
George
Just wanted to say this article helped me a great deal… Here’s my case:
WP installed in a directory: domain.com/widget
domain.com .htaccess edited for SEO purposes to say
DirectoryIndex /widget/index.php /widget/
This caused the “too many redirects” issue. Possibly because of the trailing slash in the domain.com .htaccess file??
Anyway, this fixed it:
domain.com .htaccess edited to:
DirectoryIndex /widget
Now it works.
Huzzay for cPanel!!!
Mirjam
My issue is that trying to access the login page keeps giving me a redirect to https:// but my site is in http://. Have tried everything, adding home url to config.php, disabling plugins, renewing .htaccess. There is no redirect defined in CPanel so I’m lost as to why this is happening. The site is available, but I cannot access admin.
Getting a bit hopeless here…
WPBeginner Support
Please contact your WordPress hosting provider, they may be able to help you out.
Admin
Gilbert Stawny
If none of the above works, rename your .htaccess file to htaccess.old or something. Try to log in again.
Talha Wahid
Thanks a lot, Finally i solve it by spending whole week. only adding to the wp-config.com
define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://example.com’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://example.com’);
Adrian
One way that you can create the infinite redirect loop is to set WordPress Address and Site Address using camel case, MyExampleWebsite.com for example . The domain part of a URI is supposed to be case-insensitive, the file part has to be case sensitive to cope with case-sensitive file systems. WordPress breaks if you use camel-case.
Adnane
I had the same problem, solved it by going to cpanel then look in the security tab if there is mod security , if yes deactivate it.
That was it for me.
Howard Bussey
Thank you for writing this. I set up redirection with Easy HTTPS Redirection, and ran into the “too many redirections” problem. I solved it by turning off a property in Woo Commerce. In the checkout settings, I had both “force secure checkout” and “force HTTP when leaving the checkout” selected. I unselected the “force HTTP when leaving the checkout”, and no longer see the “too many redirections” problem. I didn’t have to edit any .htaccess file.
Asser
If the issue is happening only when accessing the admin control panel , then look at the wp-admin and check if there is htaccess file in place (www/wp-admin/.htaccess ) and if you find one then rename it and refresh the admin URL (example.com/wp-admin/) and it should work .
Suraj
Simply superb, this resolved the redirect loop issue I was facing, thanks a lot, appreciate the article
Akash Gadiya
Hi, I’ve tried all the troubleshooting options here but nothing seems to work. The last thing I remember doing was to take a full backup using the Backup Wizard on the cPanel. Could that in any way lead to this error (Too many redirects)
Here’s a list of what I’ve done so far to fix this issue:
1) Removed the backup file from the root directory
2) Edited the wp-config file by adding those 2 lines of code, both with and without www
3) Deleted the .htaccess files from the root directory and wp-content folder one at a time
4) Scanned through all the comments to see if there is any possible solution, to no avail
I have sought for the help of the root admin, hopefully we’d be able to fix this ASAP. If you think I’ve missed out on anything or could try anything apart from these, please do let me know.
Thanks
Akash
Akash Gadiy
I could finally fix the problem. It had something to do with the backend I guess. My admin reset the server and that breathed life into my website again. Thanks for this post though. Good luck to all trying to fix this problem. May the force be with you