Accessing Database to Remove Duplicate Permalinks

  • I’m having trouble editing the permalink of my ‘about’ page from ‘about-2’ to ‘about’. I’ve read through many posts referring to this issue (but the posts are from 3 years ago) that suggest permanently deleting duplicate ‘about’ pages, making sure your trash is empty and that there are no drafts. I have done this but the issue persists. I also tried deleting this page and clearing my trash before creating a new page, but the permalink then became ‘about-3’. I have read that I may need to go into my database to delete the slug, but I have no experience using my database and am a bit nervous to dive into it. Are there other suggestions that could help me? Or could you guide me with some database tips? Thank you in advance.

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  • Hi!

    The bottom-line is WordPress has detected that somewhere a piece of your content has the slug ‘about’. This could be anything – a post, a page, a custom post type post, even, technically a taxonomy.

    My first recommendation is to check everywhere. Categories/Tags (although they shouldn’t really be an issue, but you never know), posts, pages, any custom post types you have etc.

    If you can’t find one, then I recommend using Sequel Pro if you’re on a mac. If you’re on Windows, I can’t really offer definitive advice of what to use, but I heard https://www.mysql.com/products/workbench/ is decent. Whichever software you use, the very first thing you should do is take a backup of all of your tables. (do a full export of the whole database).

    Then, and only then, go into your wp_posts table (assuming you left the prefix to be ‘wp_’ when you installed WordPress) and then look in the column called post_name and you’ll hopefully find one with a name of ‘about’ – don’t just delete it, though. Your best bet is to find out what it is (check what is in the post_type column for that particular item and then edit it from the back end of WordPress. You can just get rid of it, but I personally prefer tying it all up within WordPress if possible.

    Good luck!

    Thread Starter Louise Po

    (@louise-po)

    Hi Richard, Thank you. I have checked everywhere and I found something in Categories that I’d like to check with you. I have one Category titled ‘Uncategorized’ which I am unable to delete. I thought this might be because I need to have one default category so I created a second category called ‘test’. I am able to delete my ‘test’ category but not the ‘Uncategorized’ one. Beneath the Category panel there is a note from WP that says:

    “Deleting a category does not delete the posts in that category. Instead, posts that were only assigned to the deleted category are set to the category Uncategorized.
    Categories can be selectively converted to tags using the category to tag converter.”

    Could this ‘uncategorized’ category be connected with a possible deleted ‘about’ post?

    I’d like to ask your advice on this before using Sequel Pro. I am on a mac.

    Thank you.

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