RPIEM RPIEM / HopTrace Install

Chrome extension for developers and SEO practitioners

See every hop a URL takes before it lands.

Open any page, click the toolbar icon, and HopTrace shows the full path the browser took to get there: every redirect in order, with its status code, the exact Location header, the time each leg cost, and the server that answered.

Add to Chrome What it shows
HopTrace popup showing the redirect chain for www.rpiem.com: a 307 HSTS upgrade, a 301 to rpiem.com, then the 200 landing page, with a waterfall of hop timings
The Chain view on www.rpiem.com: an HSTS upgrade, a hostname redirect, and the page. Each hop expands to its full request and response headers.

What you see

Five views of the same navigation. Everything comes from the page you are already looking at.

Chain

Every hop from the URL you asked for to the page you landed on. 301 or 302, meta refresh or JavaScript navigation, HTTP-to-HTTPS upgrade or cross-domain handoff: each one is labelled, timed, and expandable to its full request and response headers.

  • • Redirect loops called out where they happen
  • • Mixed-content downgrades flagged
  • • Server redirects told apart from pushState changes

Security

The security headers on the final response, graded and explained. Weak or missing directives come with the reason they matter and what to set instead.

  • • HSTS, Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options
  • • X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy
  • • Cookies set along the chain, with Secure, HttpOnly and SameSite flags

SEO

What the destination page tells crawlers, and whether the crawler you care about is allowed to reach it.

  • • Canonical URL, title, meta description, heading structure
  • • Open Graph tags and robots meta directives
  • • robots.txt evaluated for the destination URL

Page

Navigation timing for the landing page, alongside the document's own inventory.

  • • DNS, TCP, TLS, time to first byte, DOM content loaded
  • • Language, charset and link inventory
  • • Server, IP and, optionally, where that IP is hosted

Cost

What the redirect chain costs in round trips and milliseconds, so you can see whether collapsing two hops into one is worth doing before you open a ticket for it.

Run on this site, before and after

While building this page we pointed HopTrace at rpiem.com. It graded the site F: no HSTS, no Content-Security-Policy, no X-Frame-Options, no X-Content-Type-Options, and www.rpiem.com serving a second copy of the site instead of redirecting. Two CloudFront Functions later, it grades A. Every capture below is the shipped extension on the live site, not a mock-up.

HopTrace Security view for rpiem.com before the fix: grade F, 20 out of 100, 1 of 11 checks passed, with Strict-Transport-Security and Content-Security-Policy missing
Before. Grade F, 1 of 11 checks passed. Each failed check says why it matters and what to set.
HopTrace Security view for rpiem.com after the fix: grade A, 95 out of 100, 10 of 11 checks passed, showing the HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options and X-Content-Type-Options values
After. Grade A, 10 of 11. The one we skipped is Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy, which would break any future third-party embed.
HopTrace SEO view for rpiem.com: index and follow status, a self-referencing canonical, robots.txt results per crawler, and the sitemap URL
SEO. Index and follow status, canonical, robots.txt per crawler, sitemap.
HopTrace Page view for rpiem.com: time to first byte, DOM interactive, transfer size, HTTP/2, link counts, and the page title and description
Page. Timing, transfer size, protocol, link inventory, title and description.
HopTrace Cost view for rpiem.com: estimated visitors and revenue lost per month and year to the redirect, with editable monthly sessions and RPM
Cost. What each hop costs in visitors and revenue, with your own sessions and RPM.

How it works

Step 1
Open a page

Navigate as you normally would. HopTrace observes the navigation in that tab.

Step 2
Click the toolbar icon

The popup opens on the trace for the tab you are looking at, not an arbitrary one.

Step 3
Read the chain

Expand a hop for its headers, switch views, or reload without cache to trace again cold.

HopTrace uses the same webRequest and webNavigation events Chrome exposes to DevTools. It only observes: it does not modify, block, inject or rewrite anything on the pages you visit. Traces are written to a local IndexedDB database on your own machine, capped at the 500 most recent and 30 days of history, and can be wiped at any time from Options.

Privacy

No account. No tracking. No advertising. No analytics.

Read the full privacy policy

Your browsing history is not uploaded anywhere. Traces stay in local storage on your computer, are pruned automatically, and can be deleted outright with one button in Options.

The extension makes exactly two kinds of outbound request, both over HTTPS, and both optional:

robots.txt from the site you are visiting

Fetched from the origin of the URL being traced, to evaluate crawl rules for the destination. A plain GET with no extension-added headers, cookies or body.

Server IP lookup at ipwho.is

The resolved IP of a server in the chain is sent to label it with a country and network operator. Only that IP is sent. Your own IP address, the URL, your cookies and your request headers are not.

Both can be switched off under Options, Analysis, and the extension remains fully functional without them.

Add HopTrace to Chrome

Free. Chrome 114 or later, Manifest V3. No companion app, no sign-in, no subscription.

Add to Chrome Get support