Page returns 404 for specific permalink

Question

Had a page called locations at mysite.com/locations/. Renamed it to /locations-old/ and created a new page also at /locations/. Ran into redirect issues and permanently deleted /locations-old/. However /locations/ returns as 404.

If I change my permalink settings to plain (/?p=123/), or if give the page a parent (/foo/locations/) the page works fine. If i change the slug name by a single letter the page also works.

I've tried everything I can think of and research to fix this problem including resetting permalinks, using flush_rewrite_rules(); (with and without changing my .htaccess permissions), deleting and remaking the page, deleting old page from database and optimizing my site.

My .htaccess is clean since this is a dev site.

# 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

One interesting item of note is I used var_dump($wp_query); on my 404 page and it returns a page id of the original /locations/ page even though I've removed it from wp_posts.

How do I fix this 404 and serve up my page correctly?

Answer 1

Check your database, in the postmeta table, for meta_key _wp_old_slug. When you change a slug, WP stores it and automatically redirects the old to the new, which sounds like the reason you initially couldn't access /locations/.

Once you delete the postmeta, visit Settings > Permalinks for good measure (this refreshes permalinks) and try either using an incognito window or a HTTP header checker to verify whether the /locations/ URL is working as intended. Your browser caches redirects, so just checking in a regular window is likely to be misleading.