There is an issue with Redirection plugin for wordpress. Redirection plugin is used to create redirect rules without any technical knowledge.
About the issue…
Whenever you create a latest page inside wordpress, all visitors to your homepage get redirected to the newly created page. This used to happen before also, but seems like the issue has become severe after wordpress 3.0 release.
There may be some bug in the plugin, which results in a rule being added to its (plugin) database as you can see in screenshot below. You can see following screen by going to “WordPress Dashboard >> Tools >> Redirection” menu and then clicking on “Modified posts” group.
As you might have noticed, there is rule with URL ‘/’ (slash) being added under “Modified posts” module in Redirection Plugin. This rule is responsible for homepage redirection.
Temporary Solution
- Just select all rules made for ‘/’ (slash) as highlighted in below screenshot. Yes, there can be more than 1 rule for ‘/’ (slash) i.e. homepage redirection.
- Click on “Delete” option. You will be asked for confirmation. Just click“Yes” and you are done!
Now, this will solve problem only temporarily. Next time you create a new page, chances are this issue will surface again. So if you edit/create pages quite frequently, you may like to go for permanent solution listed below.
Permanent Solution
- On Redirection Plugins’ Settings page, click on “Modules” links.
- You will see 3 modules as shown in above screenshot. Click on “WordPress” module.
- On next screen you will see 2 groups – “Redirection” and “Modified Posts”. Click on “edit group” link, next to the “Modified Posts” group. (see screenshot)
- When you will click on “edit group” link, you will see few more options. Uncheck option saying, “Disabling a group will disable all items contained within it” (see screenshot)
- Just click Save button and you will no longer face this issue again.
This solution actually disables a feature of Redirection Plugin, which is being used by many of us unknowingly.
Every-time we manually edit slug of a published wordpress post or page, Redirection plugin create necessary rules inside “Modified Posts” group.
Summary
This issue is already open as a bug in Redirection plugin’s bug-tracker. Hopefully, this will be solved in near future.
By the way, those weird redirections rules don’t get added all the time. But if they do, you can use solutions mentioned above. 🙂
28 Comments
Thanks Rahul, I wasn’t able to use that plugin because of that issue 🙂
Glad to know that it helped 🙂
my website stopped working due to this plugin. thanks for this post. now its working fine
I really feel sorry for posting this late.
I knew this solution from long time. But only after wordpress 3.0 many people asked for it.
Thank you! perfect. what a pain that was to troubleshoot!
Rahul, you are totally awesome! Thanks for saving my skin today. Both the temp & the permanent fixes worked perfectly. You saved me from a huge headache.
Rahul, I think this may well have done the trick for me!! Thank you very much…
Thank you so much for this.
I am still experiencing this issue, even after following your guide. I even tried removing all redirects and that failed. After that I tried simply deleting the plugin and that failed.
I am at a loss as to what to do next
Mike, can u tell me more about your setup?
Also try deleting plugin via FTP. It looks like u tried that through wordpress dashboard interface.
Thanks Blake, Andrew, Tully, Mad Marc. Glad to know that u guys found this useful. 🙂
Thanks so much for publishing this! You saved my bacon.
Add me to those you helped out with this article. Had the exact same problem after updating my Archives page, now it´s working fine.
Thank you thank you thank you for this. It saved me a lot of panic and stress. The permanent solution worked perfectly and it was fast and easy to do.
Thanks a lot man. I am happy to tell me about it.
I think I’ve figured out “when” this happens.
It happens when you create a new post or page, and change the slug/path/page prior to it being published/.
The plugin doesn’t have the variable registered yet because the page wasn’t published and assumes the / and then changes the / to whatever your new page is.
I’m surprised that they haven’t fixed it yet. I didn’t notice the issue before WP 3.0.
Please let me know if you hear that it’s fixed – so I can stop babysitting the plugin…
But at least now you know what action to avoid.
Thanks for such a great blog post… I could feel the frustration creeping up once I discovered the issue. Total time lost was only 4 minutes and 32 seconds… not bad this time around. Thanks again – Wes
Thank you Rahul! I was about to pull my hair out since I just got our site approved by Google news and now it starts acting up. I appreciate your thorough blog post. It fixed it immediately!
Whew! So glad I found this post so I could fix my problem. I also have a plugin which modified my post slug to remove stop words. I guess I’ll need to keep a close eye on things upon my next blog post.
In the meantime, I’m a happy camper that now people can actually see my home page when they come to my site. I use WordPress as my entire biz website and blog, so this is SUPER important.
Your post helped me solve the problem I was having in a matter of minutes! Not having to go in and edit the database (which I saw recommended elsewhere for the same issue) was a plus too. Many thanks!
nice…
Hi Rahul, I want to really thank you.
I know above is something small that happened with my WordPress site, which after following your guide I was able to fix the problem.
But this really has saved me some trouble. After all it’s coming to a new year, in my part of the world and so many things to implement on my blog to help it achieve even more and then smack bang wallop, I hit the Home key and it constantly redirects to my latest blog post.
Thanks a lot; I subbed your fan page immediately for that. Thanks a lot again man!!
Helped when I was lost. Thanks.
I am still stuck, I was not using any redirection plugin, When installed that plugin, I didn’t found any link with “/” , I did everything which is there on your blog, but in my case the thing is also different, In dashboard whenever I edit any code and try to save it, it doesn’t saves and it redirects me to the homepage, this all started just after changing my pages name, just name not the URL,
Please help me how can i fix this?
I remove the plugin via ftp and redirect still working 🙁
the solution not work for me
I was having the same problem regarding the page redirection finally i found out this post was really interesting and was able to resolve this issue 🙂
i have a wordpress blog and these days i am having issue with random redirection of my home page.. I have set site meter and statcounter login.. Both of them shows exit links from my home page . People just navigate to my home page and they are carried out to thes spam links. but these spam links are not visible and i tried to remove them .. but i cant find any..
These spam links are total 5 and hosted on a same shared ip .. content wise similar to my site.. they hijack my visitors to my site.. any help please ??