WordPress Automatic Redirection Issue

Hi everyone,

I hope this is the right place to post about this. I have been trying to look this up, but every time I search for an issue related to Redirections and WordPress, I am pointed towards one of the Redirection plugins. But this issue is unrelated to any redirection plugin. Though, I do use a redirection Plugin (Redirection by John Godley) what’s happening is not related to any redirections we added to that said plugin.

Now, so I’m sure some of you have experienced this before, and I feel like it happens with blog posts the most. If you attempt to go to a page that has two words in the slug, such as ‘/why-wordpress/’ and instead type ‘/wordpress/’, there are times that WordPress will redirect to the correct page, even if no redirection has been manually added to the site for that specific instance.

I have set up a sample site. On this site I have created a page /podcasts/. you can still reach the page by typing /pod/ (or even just /p/) even though there are no plugins installed on the site at all.
https://donnag84.sg-host.com/podcasts/

Now that it has been established that this happens, I want to know a few things:

1) What is causing this redirection to happen?

2) How can this be stopped or turned off?

3) If it can’t be stopped or turned off, then can it be controlled?

The issue here is that my company has a website that has been experiencing redirection issues where rather than going to a certain page, the redirection is taking the user to a random, very old blog post. So we want to either turn this off, or control this in a way that these redirections don’t go to old, random posts or pages that are not really being used anymore, but still public for SEO or other reasons.

If possible, let us know how we can better manage how this works, or turn it off completely.

Thank you!