Categories with different parent categories mixing up

Hi,

Sorry if this seems confusing and long-winded but I’ll try my best to explain my issue.

My online dog shop is currently unpublished so you won’t be able to view live examples, but I’m having an issue with category URLs, specifically the following child categories – both with different parents:
1. Dog Bowls > Plastic Dog Bowls
2. Dog Beds > Plastic Dog Beds

I want the URLs to be wagandbone.net/shop/dog-bowls/plastic/ and /dog-beds/plastic/. But, when I initially had /dog-beds/plastic/, the other category (Plastic Dog Bowls) would change itself to /dog-bowls/plastic-dog-bowls/. When I tried changing the slug to just /plastic/, it wouldn’t let me. When I checked why it was because /plastic/ would have caused a duplicate child category, as the URL /dog-bowls/plastic/ actually existed, but the H1, products, etc. were all for the /dog-beds/plastic/ page. There was also a canonical tag pointing towards the plastic dog beds page. Whenever I went to edit the category, it referred back to the plastic dog beds cat. in the backend, so it wouldn’t allow me to delete.

I just now deleted the plastic dog beds category and this allowed me to change the dog bowl category to /dog-bowls/plastic/, which is great. BUT when I try and re-create the plastic dog beds category as /dog-beds/plastic/ as it was before, it does the exact same but the opposite way around. There’s now a /dog-beds/plastic/ page but with all the information from plastic dog bowls.

I know it’s not a huge deal if I redirect the defunct URL and just have /plastic-dog-beds/, but the rest of the child categories are concise without duplication, so I’d prefer to keep this the same. Plus it’s getting on my nerves how I can’t work out what’s going on!

Thanks for any advice in advance.

• This topic was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Everything else WordPress topic

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]