How to prevent automatic redirection of 404 errors and “incorrect” URLs?
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21-04-2021 - |
Question
Wordpress has a feature whereby it will automatically redirect your URLs if it percieves them to be written wrongly. Here is an example: I have a page called my-page
If I go to:
www.mysite.com/something/my-page/
it will immediately redirect me to
www.mysite.com/my-page/
as nothing exists at the first URL.
How can I turn this feature off, and instead just get a 404 if incorrect URL's are typed in?
Solution
This worked for me:
remove_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');
OTHER TIPS
As Ash suggested, you can turn off the feature by using the following code:
remove_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');
In looking at the redirect_canonical function in canonical.php, it would appear you can also modify the behavior with your own filter.
At the end of the redirect_canonical() function, there is a call to filter the final answer:
$redirect_url = apply_filters( 'redirect_canonical', $redirect_url, $requested_url );
So you could write your own filter to modify the final redirection or return null to stop the redirection, based upon the input, thus turning off the feature for a particular URL or a subset of URLs.
You can disable permalink guessing for 404s without disabling redirection of canonical URLs by adding the following line somewhere in your code (eg. in functions.php
):
add_filter('do_redirect_guess_404_permalink', '__return_false');
Relevant functions in the Wordpress code are redirect_canonical
and redirect_guess_404_permalink
in wp-includes/canonical.php
.