Bulk HTTP status code checker — paste 100 URLs, get every code at once

You have a list of URLs and one question: are they all returning what you expect? Here’s a free tool that answers it without a signup, an API key, or a desktop install.

What an HTTP status code actually tells you

Every time a browser (or Googlebot, or anyone else) requests a URL, the server answers with a three-digit code. 200 means the page loaded. 301 means it permanently moved. 404 means it’s gone. 503 means the server is having a bad afternoon. Search engines treat these codes as instructions: a 200 page can rank, a 404 page eventually drops out of the index, a 301 passes signals to its destination, a 410 tells Google to forget the URL faster than 404 does.

In isolation, checking one code is trivial — open DevTools, look at the Network tab. The trouble starts when you have 50, 200, or 700 URLs and need to know all of them, today, before something ships.

When a bulk status code checker earns its keep

A few situations where checking codes one by one stops being practical:

Migrations and replatforms. You moved from /blog/post-name to /articles/post-name and wrote a redirect rule. Now you need to know whether all 400 old URLs actually resolve to the new equivalents — or whether a quarter of them land on a generic 404 page returning a soft 200.
Sitemap audits. Your sitemap.xml lists 1,200 URLs. Google won’t tell you which ones are broken until it crawls them. A bulk check on the sitemap surfaces dead URLs in minutes.
Post-deploy spot checks. A release went out an hour ago. You want to confirm the top 80 revenue pages still return 200 before you log off.
Recovering after a bad redirect rule. Someone wrote a regex that was a little too greedy. Now half your category URLs redirect to the homepage. You need a list of which ones, fast.
Content audits. You’re cleaning up old content and need to know which URLs are still live, which have been redirected, and which were quietly removed without anyone noting it.

These are the moments a bulk HTTP status code checker is the right tool for the job — not a full crawl, not a desktop app, just a list in, a list out.

How the tool works

Paste up to 100 URLs into the box, one per line. Press the button. For each URL, the tool issues a real GET request through a thin server-side proxy (browsers can’t read cross-origin status codes directly, so the proxy does the fetching and returns the response — nothing logged, nothing stored). Within a few seconds, you get a results table.

The two columns that matter most sit side by side:

Initial — the code the URL itself returns. This is the first thing the server says when asked.
Final — where the chain ends up after following redirects (up to 10 hops). If the chain loops back on itself, you get a clear LOOP marker instead.

Both columns matter, and a single-column tool will mislead you in one direction or the other. A “show me the final code only” view hides the fact that you’ve quietly racked up a four-hop redirect chain — fine for users, ugly for crawl budget. A “show me the first response only” view hides the fact that a 301 chain ends in a 404 and you’re bleeding link equity into a dead URL. Seeing both at once is how you spot a redirect that’s technically returning 301 but landing nowhere.

Each row also shows hop count, response time, and a click-to-expand chain — every step of the redirect path with its own status badge, response time, and a clickable link so you can open any intermediate URL in a new tab.

Features built around how you’d actually use it

A few things we added because we kept reaching for them ourselves:

User-agent picker. Browser by default, but you can also send the request as Googlebot Smartphone or Googlebot Desktop. Useful when a site cloaks bots, when a CDN serves a different response to crawlers, or when you suspect a 403 is bot-specific.
Sort by hops or response time. Find the slowest URLs first, or the worst chains first. Click the column header, click again to reverse.
Filter by hop count. Show only URLs with 1+ hops, 2+, 5+, or only the ones that loop or exceed the redirect limit. Handy for triaging a long list of “mostly fine” URLs down to the ones that need attention.
CSV export. What you see is what you download — the export honors your active filter and sort order, so the file matches the view you spent five minutes refining.
Hover any status badge for a short MDN-style description, or scroll to the cheat sheet below the tool for a plain-English run-through of what every 1xx through 5xx code means.

Color coding is straightforward: green for 2xx, gray for 3xx, amber for 4xx, red for 5xx and request errors.

Common situations the tool surfaces well

A few patterns we’ve seen come up enough to be worth naming:

A 301 chain that ends in a 404. The Initial column shows 301, looks fine, you’d move on. The Final column shows 404. That URL is silently leaking link equity from a redirect to nothing. Fix the destination or write a new redirect.

A 410 that should have been a 301. Or, more often, the reverse: a permanently-removed page redirected to the homepage as a “catch-all.” Don’t. Redirecting a removed page to your homepage tells Google the homepage is the relevant content for whatever the old URL was about. A 410 is the honest code for a permanently-removed page — let it return 410.

A Googlebot-only 403. The page loads in your browser. Switch the user-agent to Googlebot, run again, and the same URL returns 403. Now you know why it dropped out of the index three weeks ago. Probably a bot-protection rule or a misconfigured firewall.

A 500 hiding behind a CDN. The CDN returns 200 with a cached error page. The Final column shows 200, but the response time is 12 seconds and the body is a stale snapshot. The status code looks healthy; the actual user experience isn’t. (For these cases, response time in the table is often the first hint something’s off.)

The thing one-shot checks can’t do

A bulk check answers the question for right now. It doesn’t answer it for tomorrow morning at 3 a.m., when a CMS update accidentally changes a redirect rule. It doesn’t answer it next week, when an SSL renewal misfires and the page starts returning 503 to Googlebot. It doesn’t answer it next month, when someone updates a plugin and a chunk of product URLs starts soft-404ing.

This is the gap continuous monitoring fills. We built Wygard because we were tired of running the same one-shot check on the same URLs every Monday — and missing the days in between when something quietly broke. We watch the URLs that matter to you, every day, and alert you the moment one stops returning the status code you expected. Not the whole site. Just the pages that move the needle.

The bulk checker on this page is a good Monday-morning tool. If it’s becoming a regular ritual, it’s worth letting us run it for you in the background.

Try it, then maybe automate it

The tool is here, free, no signup: wygard.com/tools/http-status-bulk-checker/. Paste your list, check what you’ve got. If a 200 today on your top 50 URLs would let you sleep better tomorrow night too, the free trial is the next step. Trust, but verify.