How to prevent WordPress from redirecting single page to prefixed category archive with same name?

Question

I have been trying to solve this problem for hours. I would like to have a page with a simple slug (/blog) and a category term with the same name (/category/blog) exist on my site together at the same time. But the problem I am running into is that my page (/blog) keeps redirecting to the category archive page (/category/blog).

I have tried the following:

• adjusting my permalinks by clearly specifying my category base
• using remove_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical'); to suppress redirects
• using add_filter( 'template_redirect', 'blog_redirect_filter', 10, 3 ); to try and target my blog category specifically

I am running out of ideas. How can I stop my site from redirecting an existing page to a category archive when they each have different slugs?

EDIT

I figured it out! Classic wait-until-you-post-publicly-before-figuring-it-out-yourself problem. It was a fun mix of Yoast, custom permalinks, and category bases all conflicting with each other.

My answer:

• Make sure your category base is specified in Permalinks. Save them.
• Remove any custom permalink slugs in the category terms.
• Go to Yoast > Search Appearance > Taxonomies and scroll to the very bottom. Make sure Category URLs is set to Keep.
• Clear any cache and/or flush_rewrite_rules.
• Voila it's fixed.

Answer 1

Thanks @Tom J Nowell for suggesting I post this fix as an answer!

So the answer I found was that Yoast, a custom permalink plugin, and permalinks category bases were conflicting with each other on my site. Here's what I did to fix it:

• Make sure your category base is specified in Permalinks. Save them.
• Remove any custom permalink slugs in the category terms.
• Go to Yoast > Search Appearance > Taxonomies and scroll to the very bottom. Make sure Category URLs is set to Keep.
• Clear any cache and/or flush_rewrite_rules.
• Voila it's fixed.