How do I remove unwanted pages like archive, search, etc.?

Question

By default WordPress pushes out a whole array of pages I don’t want or need - archive, author, blog, monthly, recent posts, categories, comments, attachment, taxenomies, search, search results, and probably a few others I’ve missed.

Most of the time I’m building regular broshure websites with no need for anything except a few fairly static pages. How do I get rid of all the other pages? Is there a plugin that will do this? Do I have to set up a dozen redirects in the .htaccess? I’ve tried searching, but all I find is how to hide parts of a page, or customise the sitemap to hide from searches. But I don't want those pages at all, so even entering the direct URL shouldn't work.

Answer 1

You could redirect anything that's not a page or admin to home via the parse_query action:

function wpa_parse_query( $query ){
    if( ! is_admin() && ! $query->is_page() ) {
        wp_redirect( home_url() );
        exit;
    }
}
add_action( 'parse_query', 'wpa_parse_query' );

If it's not an admin screen or a query for a page, it'll redirect. You can see all of the types of pages this will remove under the Conditional Tags page in Codex.

Answer 2

Joost de Valk's WordPress SEO plugin is capable of disabling most, if not all, archives you mention:

Answer 3

You can user another small script, without adding any plugin. There is a post here and the code to add in the index.php of your theme is this:

if(is_archive()) {
    // force 404
    $wp_query->set_404();
    status_header( 404 );
    nocache_headers();
    include("404.php");
    die;
}

Hope you find it useful.

Answer 4

For anyone wondering, I ended up using .htaccess 301 redirects.

# Redirect useless pages
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RedirectMatch 301 ^/portfolio/.*$ /gallery/
RedirectMatch 301 ^/author/.*$ /
RedirectMatch 301 ^/category/.*$ /
RedirectMatch 301 ^/tag/.*$ /
RedirectMatch 301 ^/20.*$ /

The blogpost archive ^/20.*$ isn't ideal, but it will have to do for now. Also don't know what other pages I might've missed.

Answer 5

It can also be achieved using the template_redirect hook.

You can check for each type of archives pages, or "disable" them altogether.

• Return a 404error or redirect to another page, I prefer the 404 approach-

In functions.php :

/* Disable archives pages */
add_action('template_redirect', 'my_disable_archives_function');

function my_disable_archives_function()
{
  /* Conditional checks examples:
      is_category() 
      is_tag()
      is_date()
      is_author()
      is_tax()
      is_search() ... */

    // Return a 404 for all archive types, except the my_custom_post_type archive.
    $post_types = array('my_custom_post_type');

  if ( (is_archive() && !is_post_type_archive( $post_types )) )
  {
      global $wp_query;
      $wp_query->set_404();
      status_header(404);
  }
}