Why do my new Wordpress pages redirect to home / staging site?

Question

Hi my Wordpress site hosted on WP Engine is wrongly redirecting to either the homepage or the prod site (mysitelive.wpengine.com). I use sucuri fire wall and wp rocket, but have tried every combination of clearing caches / deactivating plugins. Where could this 302 redirect be coming from?

$ curl -kILH "host: example.com" http://00.00.00.00/badredirectpage HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved Location: https://example.com/badredirectpage Content-Length: 74 Content-Type: text/html

HTTP/2 500 server: nginx date: Thu, 03 Feb 2022 21:03:04 GMT

Answer 1

There are quite a few places, plugins, tools, etc that can cause re-directs, not to even consider custom code.

If you think the re-direct is in your database and you are comfortable with wp-cli then you can use this command:

wp search-replace '00.00.00.00' 'example.com' --dry-run

This will tell you where the data you're searching for is located. Remove --dry-run and wp-cli will actually make the change.

If its NOT in the database, you need to look in your wp-config file, disable plugins and check for any custom code (functions.php for themes and child themes etc) to see if there is a piece of code forcing a redirect.)

You could try searching for it with SSH within files by using grep:

grep -rH "00.00.00.00"