Automatically redirect …/child to …/parent/child?

Hi Beth:

In your General / Settings admin page, what are your WordPress Address and Site Address settings?

Both fields are the same as the URLS I listed above for the two sites, respectively, but no trailing / on either one.

The new site was an automated installation via the host, and both those fields are grayed out. I don’t remember running into that before.

If those settings are greyed out it could be because those settings are being overridden by WP_SITEURL and WP_HOME in your wp-config.php file. Plugin conflicts can also cause this.

However, if these settings are correct, try resetting your permalinks by going to Settings/Permalinks and choosing Save (even though you are not changing other settings on that page).

I can check the config file, or the database directly.

What do I want them to be, to make this work?

It’s not being hard coded in wp-config; this is the only reference:

define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘https://’ . $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’]);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘https://’ . $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’]);
define(‘WP_CONTENT_URL’, ‘/wp-content’);
define(‘DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE’, $_SERVER[‘HTTP_HOST’]);

Upon further investigation, I see that they’re grayed out on all 4 associated sites. They were all auto-installs. I’m going to contact the hosting company, or the installer and see what’s up.

The hosting company just pointed me to the instructions for how to hard code it in wp-config, or use functions.php to change it.

I now have it hard coded to the actual domain – https://www.lowabram.com – instead of the temp ULR, but I’m still having the same problem, that the links are requiring the parent slug.

https://www.lowabram.com/auto-accidents should be redirecting to
https://www.lowabram.com/practice-areas/auto-accidents but instead, I’m getting a 404.

Looking at another WP site I’ve recently set up (different host, also an auto-install), I’ve got those settings the same (the domain for both, no trailing / ) and it works, if you go to

domain.com/parent/child/ you get redirected to domain.com/parent/child/

What could be different here?

Should there be something in .htaccess to make this redirect happen?

I had to edit .htaccess to increase the upload file size limit to import the old data; maybe I deleted something that should’ve been there when I added the code to do that?

A few ideas:

– Do you only have a few “parent” categories? If so there could have been specific entries in .htaccess for each.

– There are plugins that handle URL redirects – is it possible one of your old plugins is not activated or has different settings than originally? Sometimes these are specific redirect plugins and sometimes they are part of SEO plugins.

– WordPress has a feature called automatic redirection whereby if it can’t find a page it will look for another with a “similar” URL and deliver it. It could be working differently on the old and new sites.

There are tons of parent / child pages, and I think it should be happening automatically. It is on on other WP sites.

Are your WP sites doing this redirect the way I think it ought to work?

Any idea where/how that automatic redirection is being controlled? Something screwy there, maybe?

Yes, I do have a site that redirects in this way.

I also have a site that I did _not_ want to redirect in this way and I overrode the WordPress behavior by using code like this in functions.php:

‘add_filter( ‘redirect_canonical’, ‘remove_redirect_guess_404_permalink’ ,10, 2);
function remove_redirect_guess_404_permalink( $redirect_url, $requested_url ) {
if ( is_404() ) {
return false;
}
else {
return $redirect_url;
}’

Do you have an example URL for one of the old sites that does behave as you want?

I came across a few articles about how to override it like that.

Working:
https://www.philadelphiamedicalmalpractice.com

Not working:
https://www.philadelphiamedicalmalpractice.com.php53-5.ord1-1.websitetestlink.com/

Can you compare the old and new .htaccess files?