Ok – for all those who go searching for this problem and never ever find an answer (as I have done countless times over the last month or so!) here is my answer and it worked for me!
I had an image uploaded with exactly the same name as the page I was having problems with. My image was called monthly.jpeg and my page was called monthly. WP wouldn’t allow this and if you have this problem and type in your base url followed by the name you want to use but can’t because WP puts a ‘-2’ on the end of it – i.e. ‘www.testwebsite.co.uk/nameofpage’ – you will see what WP thinks is the page and that will tell you why it won’t let you rename your page to that name.
In my case it was what WP calls a ‘post’ but which is actually an ‘attachment’ page automatically created when you upload an image. Now, I also have images called ‘yearly’ and ‘quarterly’ and they don’t upset the pages with those names at all so it might have been caused when I switched back to ‘default’ permalinks and then back to ‘name of post’ again? Who knows – but deleting the image (it wasn’t used any more anyway) obviously deleted the attachment page and sorted the problem!
Hope this helps anyone out there with this recurring and really frustration problem ??
