404 on specific pages unless permalink is set to Plain

  • We’re having a really strange issue on a site where most pages work fine, but about a dozen we’ve noticed so far are giving 404’s unless we set the permalink structure to Plain. Normally we have it on Postname, I’ve tried all the other options, and only Plain lets the page load on the front-end. We’re on the latest version of WP, and I’ve already tried disabling all the plugins and switching to the Twenty Twenty Three theme. And I’ve tried switching the htaccess back to just the basic fresh install version to rule out anything weird in there.

    It seems to be something specific to the pages rather than the URLs, because if I change the slug on one of those pages, and create a new page with the old slug, the new page with the old slug will load fine. I’ve also tried using plugins to clone the pages, and the cloned copies won’t load either even though they’re at a new address. I’m not seeing any common factors among the affected pages, I don’t think any of them were modified recently.

    Any ideas what might be causing an issue there?

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  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    The new page has different content than the one that does not work, though they both used the same slug? (at different times of course)

    I would suspect something about your server’s security configuration. If your host is running modSecurity on their servers, it may need its configuration modified. It’s the only thing I can think of that would let particular content through with plain permalinks but not “pretty” permalinks.

    Thread Starter nineplanetsllc

    (@nineplanetsllc)

    The issue must have been something specific to some content or setting on the pages, becase it was only happening on a few of the pages, not all of them. Most of them were just fine with whatever permalink structure we had them set to, so the usual resetting permalinks/server config stuff didn’t help. The host wasn’t having any luck tracking things down either. We ended up restoring a backup to fix the issue. That also highlighted it being page-specific, because the first restore fixed all but 2 pages, then we had to roll back further to fix those 2. The odd thing is there weren’t any recent revisions showing up for those pages, so it doesn’t seem like it would have been page content changes.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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