404 when using pagination in a category

Question

I always struggle with pagination in wordpress. I really wish that was a definitive guide to wordpress rewrite rules.

I have a site setup this way:

1. permalink custom structure: /%category%/%postname%/
2. I have a page named "blog"
3. I have the reading settings making the page "blog" the Posts Page.
4. I'm only using the index.php to list all posts
5. No custom queries, just the regular loop

Everything works beautifully as long as I am viewing all posts. No issue with pagination here.

All posts -> domain.com/blog/ (works)
All posts page 2 -> domain.com/blog/page/2/ (works)

However as soon as click in a category, let's say "news", and try to see the next page I get a 404.

News -> domain.com/news (works)
News page 2 -> domain.com/news/page/2 (doesn't work)

Nothing atypical in the .htaccess file, and no other custom rewrite rules are present.

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

So what I am doing wrong? This is pretty standard wordpress setup. I would also appreciate if someone could point me out to some awesome guide on wordpress rewrite rules. I have read a lot about them here, but there are so many different cases, I just want to understand how it works.

Update:

I ended up doing the following:

Setting the permalinks to /date/post tile/ format Setting the category base to /category/

This way pagination works for all posts and posts under a category. In my opinion it's not ideal because I can only get it to work if I have a category base, and the category base needs to be a fixed name.

So now I have:

All posts -> domain.com/blog/page/2
Category posts -> domain.com/category/category_name/page/2

Pagination works in both cases.

Answer 1

You have any News page? Check your page list. I think that there have a page which is taking the same category slug.