WP appending -2 to the end of my slug

Question

I would like to create a page on wordpress with this URL: https://my-website.org/landing-page/

However, it seems that the slug /landing-page/ has already been created in the past because it does not return a "404 Page not found" error but redirects to the home page: https://my-website.org/

When I try to create a page with the following Url: https://my-website.org/landing-page/ wordpress generates a new page with a -2 at the end of the slug.

( Next Url: https://my-website.org/landing-page-2/)

This is something I absolutely want to avoid.

I've searched all my pages, articles and media to see if an element links to https://my-website.org/landing-page/ but I've found absolutely nothing. I don't have any pages in the trash. I didn't have a category with the same name as my page.

I purged the cache in the LiteSpeed cache plugin and that didn't work.

However, I've just noticed something strange:

I've tried to create a post (and not a page as previously tried) and wordpress generates the url I want: https://my-website.org/landing-page/

However, when I click on "Edit with oxygen" to edit the page, it sends me to the oxygen editing interface on the site's home page: https://my-website.org/

I've modified the page to check which URL the interface modifies and it's the home page it's modifying: https://my-website.org/

Can you help me find a solution?

Thank you!

Answer 1

It might not be a Page. WordPress is very picky about slugs sometimes. You might have to dig in the database's wp_posts table and see what other post exists somewhere with that name - sometimes it can be an odd thing like a Media Library (image) file.

Once you find it, if you completely delete it - preferably through wp-admin so all its postmeta gets deleted too - you should then be able to publish a new Page (which is also going to be in the wp_posts table) with the slug you want, without WP adding the "-2".