Assign Parent Page - Now 404 Error

Question

The strangest thing is happening.

I have a page that I want to assign a parent page to. When I assign a specific parent page to it, then the page shows a 404 error.

Here is the weird thing, this only happens when trying to assign one specific parent page. Any other parent page is just fine.

Example: www.website.com/city (my new page) www.website.com/locations (old page that I want to be the parent page) www.example.com/locations/city (what the URL should now be with the parent page, but getting a 404 error)

I can assign any other page as a parent and I do not get a 404 error. Example like these are just fine: www.example.com/about/city (this works just fine) www.example.com/anypage/city (this works just fine) ect...

So it's ONLY when assigning the /locations/ page as the parent, I am getting a 404 error.

Any ideas why this would be happening, and any suggestions for a fix?

Answer 1

PLUGIN 1: After looking into this site further, I noticed I have a plugin that has created a section in the sidebar called "Products". Within the "Products" section is a category labeled "Locations". This is creating the /locations/part of the URL. There are several pages like the example www.example/locations/city-state. This is for a filter based search on the website to see products, and locations some of the products are at.

PLUGIN 2: There is another plugin that was installed for a Google maps locations page. This is the www.example.com/locations/ page I mentioned in my original question. When you visit this page you can see a map with several location map markers on it. You can also see a specific location on the map by using a state dropdown option.

These two plugins are completely separate and serve different purposes (PLUGIN 1 is for products and locations of each product, and the PLUGIN 2 is only to show store locations).

With that being discovered, I don't think I will be able to use /locations/ as a parent page even though that is an actual page. And I won't be able to have the store location URLs as I originally wanted....www.example.com/locations/city, www.example.com/locations/city2, www.example.com/locations/city3.

I hope that all makes sense. Fyi....I took over this website a couple months ago and was not aware with how some of the customizations were set up. Whoever setup the /locations/ store locator map page, should have used a different path such as /our-locations/ for example.

Answer 2

Just to confirm the solution: I had this same issue and the problem was, in fact, that I had a custom post type that had the same name as a parent page/directory.

So, in my case, I had www.mydomain.com/policies/ and a CPT called "Policies," so any child page in the policies directory would throw a 404.

My solution was to update the slug for the Policies page (in my case to www.mydomain.com/anywordhere-policies/) and that immediately solved the problem.