mysterious issue with stop words in urls not working - how can I restore multiple url access?

Question

I have a site that until recently, you could access a url of a post on the site with or without certain "stop words".

Now though for some mysterious reason that doesn't work. So to clarify, the original post url of domain.com/the-green-cat.html WAS also accessible as domain.com/green-cat.html (without the "the").

Now though if I try to access the page without "the" in the url I get a 404 error.

The site owner assures me that no SEO plugin was installed on the site that is now not present. Looking through the installed plugins I cant see anything at least currently installed that could influence this kind of core functionality.

Can anyone think how else this functionality may have been added and more importantly what is the simplest way to get it back? To clarify, I need BOTH urls to work, I don't just want a plugin that permanently rewrites the urls to only work without stop words.

This has likely occurred as the site has multiple developers not in total communication with each other and the site also underwent a makeover with a new theme being created.

Answer 1

There is no way this kind of functionality exist without some plugin/code to implement it and without doing actual rewrites. Wordpress core do not know what is a "stop word" and do not believe in multiple URL for the same content. If a theme was changed, this might have been a code in the theme that was responsible for such a functionality.