Check for any problematic meta refresh tags

A meta refresh tag is an HTML instruction that tells the browser to redirect to another URL after a set number of seconds. It sits in the page head and looks like this: meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5; url=https://example.com". For most Webflow sites, there's no legitimate reason to have one.

Google treats meta refresh redirects differently depending on the delay. A zero-second meta refresh is treated similarly to a 301 — Google follows it and passes most link equity. A delayed meta refresh (anything over 0 seconds) is treated with less certainty. The user experience is also poor: the page loads, then suddenly jumps to a different URL a few seconds later. It's disorienting and it breaks the back-button behavior users expect.

How to check: in Webflow, look through Site Settings → Custom Code for any meta http-equiv="refresh" in your head code. Also check individual page settings — each page can have its own custom code in Page Settings → Custom Code, which is separate from the site-wide code. If you run a site crawl with Screaming Frog, it will flag pages that include a meta refresh directive.

If you find a meta refresh used for a redirect, replace it with a proper 301 in Webflow's redirect settings and remove the tag. One exception: pages that auto-reload to show live data, like a dashboard or a status page. If the reload is intentional and genuinely serves the user, keep it. But verify it's actually necessary and not a leftover from a feature that no longer exists.

The connection to JavaScript redirects: both are client-side redirects that happen after the browser loads the page, rather than at the HTTP level. Google can process both, but neither is as clean as a server-level 301. If you find either in your code, the right move is to replace them with Webflow's built-in redirect tool.

Running this check before launch is part of auditing your site's full redirect behavior. You want Google's first crawl to be clean: every URL either responds with a 200 (page exists), a 301 (permanently moved), or a 404 (page doesn't exist). Meta refresh tags and JavaScript redirects add unnecessary complexity to that picture and give Google less confidence about where your content actually lives.