404 error on subcategory pages

Question

I have seen some other questions and answers on this but unable to resolve at the moment.

I have some categories setup as follows:

Blog

-- Sub Cat

The Permalinks are currently setup with custom type: /%category%/%postname%/ and the category base is set to .

At the moment

• If I go to a post in a subcategory it works.
• Accessing the parent blog category works.
• Accessing the child category does not work

I have tried changing the permalinks to the following /%category%/%subcategory%/%postname%/.

This causes the following behaviour:

• Main Blog category access works.

• Sub Category access works.

• Post within subcategory does not work.

Note: The link it tries to take me to is the following:

/blog/sub-cat-name/%subcategory%/long-post-name-or-something/

Answer 1

The cause of this issue for future reference was the '.' in the category base, which was added to resolve a previous issue. Removing this and using /category/postname (per question) works, so will look for an alternative resolution to the category base issue.

Answer 2

You can change your permalinks, adding some extension at the end:

/%category%/%postname%.html

Answer 3

Solution, Permalink > Common Settings > Custom Structure

Use this slug: /%category%/

Select only sub-category for the post. There is no need to select Parent Category for a post.

Answer 4

Solution using Yoast SEO plugin.

I had a similar problem which I solved by downloading and activating the Yoast SEO plugin, then on the main dashboard:

Yaost SEO > Settings > Categories and Tags > Categories > Additional settings.

disable "Show the categories prefix in the slug".

Answer 5

Workaround

Settings > Permalinks > Common Settings

Custom Structure /%category%/%post_id%/%postname%/

Settings > Permalinks > Optional

Category base .

Tested with WordPress version 4.8