Page Links become "404 File not Found" when Categories are Excluded from Home

Hi,

I moved my blog from discojing.com and hapatite.com. I only want to show new posts from hapatite.com on the home page while keeping all the old content for archives, indexes, and search.

When I exclude the category I applied to migrated posts, discojing.com, cat id 88, it makes the pages ~4 instead of 50+, which is good. But then when I click on any page other than 2, it’s “File not Found”.

This is when I exclude it in functions.php with

function exclude_category($query) {
if ($query->is_home()) {
$query->set('cat', '-88');
}
return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_category');

Or when I use Simple Exclude plugin. Is there any way to do a if_category, is_home, don’t show argument? I’ve used if_category to add things, but not hide content.

I heard this might be an issue with published posts and expected post numbers not matching up.