HTTP proxy checker

HTTP proxies are the workhorses of the proxy world. Your client sends its web requests to the proxy, and the proxy forwards them to the target site. For encrypted sites (which is nearly everything now) the proxy opens a tunnel with the CONNECT method and passes the encrypted traffic straight through, so it works fine with HTTPS pages too.

Most proxies sold for scraping, sneaker bots, SEO monitoring, and ad verification are HTTP proxies. If a provider handed you an address without saying which protocol it speaks, HTTP is the safest first guess.

1. 01Leave the protocol on HTTP, or switch to HTTPS if your provider explicitly said the proxy port itself uses TLS.
2. 02Paste the address, for example user:[email protected]:8080 or just 203.0.113.5:8080.
3. 03Hit Check proxy. If traffic flows through, you get the exit IP and response time. If it does not, you see the exact error the connection produced.

Here is a thing that trips up almost everyone. An "HTTP proxy" can still carry HTTPS traffic. The HTTP in the name describes how your client talks to the proxy, not what kind of sites you can visit through it. So a plain HTTP proxy will happily load encrypted sites.

An "HTTPS proxy" in the strict sense means the connection between you and the proxy itself is encrypted with TLS. Few providers actually sell these. If HTTP fails and you are sure the address is right, HTTPS is worth one try, but nine times out of ten HTTP is the setting you want. There is a longer explanation of the protocol differences in our SOCKS5 vs HTTP guide.