timiambeing

Hi John – yes I posted the answer elsewhere but forgot this thread! Mine was simple – I found I had an image in my media library with exactly the same name as a page, apparently this is not allowed but not mentioned anywhere either! I deleted the image (as it wasn’t even being used anywhere) and straight away I could rename my page – hope this helps! ??

Ok – for all those who go searching for this problem and never ever find an answer (as I have done countless times over the last month or so!) here is my answer and it worked for me!

I had an image uploaded with exactly the same name as the page I was having problems with. My image was called monthly.jpeg and my page was called monthly. WP wouldn’t allow this and if you have this problem and type in your base url followed by the name you want to use but can’t because WP puts a ‘-2’ on the end of it – i.e. ‘www.testwebsite.co.uk/nameofpage’ – you will see what WP thinks is the page and that will tell you why it won’t let you rename your page to that name.

In my case it was what WP calls a ‘post’ but which is actually an ‘attachment’ page automatically created when you upload an image. Now, I also have images called ‘yearly’ and ‘quarterly’ and they don’t upset the pages with those names at all so it might have been caused when I switched back to ‘default’ permalinks and then back to ‘name of post’ again? Who knows – but deleting the image (it wasn’t used any more anyway) obviously deleted the attachment page and sorted the problem!

Hope this helps anyone out there with this recurring and really frustration problem ??

Hi Matt – yes I’ve seen that explanation a number of times thanks, but mine is simply the word Monthly that WP insists on renaming Monthly-2! Looks crap if anyone looks in the address bar and very unprofessional! I have nothing in the trash, but I notice that I do have ‘posts’ with that name – I haven’t created any posts but if I go to my development address and type the base url followed by /monthly I am taken to a JPEG with that name?!

Me too – this is infuriating! I have a page called Monthly, there is no trash item with that name, no post or item anywhere yet WP refuses to allow me to change the slug back Monthly from Monthly-1 – I can of course change it to anything else! I have tried cleaning the database and still no joy – I have not seen an answer to this problem in all the past 4 years posts I have searched this last hour or so – the thread always just ends with no solution. Doesn’t anybody know what to do if you have a duplicate name that actually doesn’t exist anywhere you can actually get at it – I don’t want my swanky new site to have URLs that are obviously amateur looking?