WordPress CMS Seems Disconnected From Actual Site

Cooee.

This particular page (because of the A-Z mechanism), is either driven by a custom page templste, OR it could be a shortcode (“[thingie]” in the text). The text you are seeing is probably part of the development or testing.

The clue to tracking it down is its distinct permalink: “courts/locations/”
Possibly this is an indication that it is a POST with a category of “courts”

Sorry I haven’t been able to anything more that tell you more places to look.

@rossmitchell Thanks for the feedback. I actually tried changing the template/layout to a confirmed working one but still no luck.

Also, I don’t see any shortcode inside the CMS that could be controlling the page content. If that were the case, I can simply remove the shortcode and replace it with fresh HTML codes.

I’m not sure I understand your reference to permalink, post, and category. This is actually a page and not a post and I don’t see any of our post with the same content.

Because of the unusual format of the display…i think it is possible that
this page area MIGHT be controlled by a custom post type.
https://www.criminal-lawyers.com.au/courts/locations

do you have an area in your dashboard named Courts or Locations?

@contentiskey Thanks for the feedback. Yes, there is exactly an area in our dashboard named “Courts”. All the pages inside this area are court location pages. Examples:

/courts/locations/melbourne-county-court
/courts/locations/melbourne-magistrates-court
/courts/locations/melbourne-childrens-court

The “/courts/locations” page is not inside this area but is instead inside a different area named “Pages” (where general pages are placed).

Where can I look into to check for this custom post type setting that MIGHT be causing this issue?

Cooee from the shadow of the coat-hanger.

The clue to finding the thing that generates the page has to be the address used to load it: “courts/locations”

An issue you should address is that the A-Z index does not work, they only reload this same page. Part of the mechanism has to be missing. Having a list of the courts would fix this.

The link:
/courts/locations/melbourne-magistrates-court
does work as expected.

@rossmitchell I can actually access the supposed backend of “/courts/locations” (which is that inside the dashboard area named “Pages”). The problem is it seems disconnected from the actual page (i.e. the content is different from the source code of the actual page). And like I said, whatever I do to this supposed backend doesn’t get reflected on the actual page. There really is a disconnect.

I can easily address the A-Z index issue. In fact, I know exactly why it’s not working (the source code of the actual page clearly shows the error). But the problem is whatever adjustment I do inside the CMS (on the supposed backend of the page), it never really happens on the actual page.

I wonder what’s causing the disconnect and where to find it,

Suggest that you take a backup of your website database, Search it for your page text, you will find multiple instances because of revision history, you will know the most recent one because of the recent changes you made to track this page. Just maybe this shakes loose its identity in PAGE or POST, even widget text.

As a crazy alternative, this text could be buried in a page template, I am only suggesting this because I am running out of options.

If it gets much harder I will be suggesting that you get someone to download the whole website and run it under a microscope in a localhost, able to do things that can’t be done on a live site.