Site automatically redirects to home page

  • I have inherited a site built by another company. Instead of true redirects to the correct page, every old link redirects to the home page (soft 404s) which is not ideal. They are claiming that wordpress 3.4.2 does that automatically but I have not seen that issue with other older wordpress sites. Additionally, I am not seeing a .htaccess file that would be doing the work in this (in my FTP environment). The site is at:

    https://www.potomac.edu/

    To see what I am talking about, try putting in this old url and you will see it automatically goes to the home page instead of the about page which would be better:

    https://www.potomac.edu/about-us/

    This happens with all incorrect urls (i.e. being redirected to home). 301 redirect plugins are being overridden by this automatic redirect.

    We want to remove this but we’re having a hard time finding what is actually doing the automatic redirect. Any ideas?

    Thanks in advance.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • https://www.potomac.edu/about/ seems to work… also, look in your theme for a 404.php file…typically it will note something like ‘link not found, try again, but perhaps it’s redirecting to home instead…

    Thread Starter waterwalk

    (@waterwalk)

    Yep, https://www.potomac.edu/about/ is currently part of the menu, but /about-us/ is the old link which instead of getting redirected goes to the home page.

    I will check the 404 file to see if there’s anything there. Thanks for looking and for the suggestion : )

    Thread Starter waterwalk

    (@waterwalk)

    I looked and unfortunately I’m not seeing anything in the 404.php file. The only thing that looks like is not code for the menu and content is this:

    <?php header(“Location: /”); get_header(); ?>

    The rest of the page looks pretty normal. I am stumped as to how all these 404s are being redirected to the home page without an .htaccess file or a plugin in place. Still open to ideas if anyone has any.

    Thanks.

    Thread Starter waterwalk

    (@waterwalk)

    I’m still researching. Is it possible that line of code:

    <?php header(“Location: /”); get_header(); ?>

    is sending all 404’s to the home page (“/”)? I thought it was just making a call for the header but perhaps it’s doing more?

    Typically we just need:

    <?php get_header(); ?>

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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