OH NO! My home page has a redirection error!
OH NO! My home page has a redirection error!!
What happened? Everything was great. My site was getting traffic. I was on a roll writing new content. Life was good.
So the red light of "updates available" came on. No problem right. I've been keeping my site updated as soon as an update appears so what could go wrong.
I ran all the updates just like normal but this time when I go to preview my site it doesn't come up. That's so weird, right? I didn't change any theme settings, no new plugins, nothing changed but now my site is down.
GOOGLE! My friend Google to the rescue. I go on a quest to dig down and find treasure on the internet. After about an hour of searching, I finally find a conversation from 2014 that talks about an update causing the home page to throw an error about redirection.
I check my site and realize that it's only the Home page. The rest of the site comes up if I go directly to preview a post or any other page. Weird, right?
So, the problem has to do with the Settings > Permalinks. Mine was set to Post name. I don't even know if it came that way or if I set it for some reason. But that is where the problem starts.
If you have your Appearance > Customize > Homepage Settings configured so that your homepage displays "A static page", then you may have the problem.
The combination of using A static page and the Post name permalink caused my home page to stop working.
The fix is simple. Change the Settings > Permalinks to use Plain. Yippy! Hurray!
My Home Page is back and I'm good to go. Thank you, Google!
Let me know if anyone has run across this problem, or better yet, needs any help getting out of it!
2021-08-14 Update:
So, I hate when things break and I don't know why!
Yes, I dug deeper into the problem cause it still happened if I used the Post name setting and I still wanted to set the Permalinks back to Post name.
Turns out I had installed/uninstalled Wordfence, the security plugin. And even though it was uninstalled, it left behind a nasty change.
The .user.ini file in the root of my site had a line in it that redirected traffic through a Wordfence-waf.php file.
.user.ini
; Wordfence WAF
auto_prepend_file = '/var/www/volumes/xvdj/vhosts/onlineindustryexpert.com/httpdocs/wordfence-waf.php'
; END Wordfence WAF
So this was the real problem that was causing the redirection error!
The fix was to delete the entry from the .user.ini file and now EVERYTHING WORKS AGAIN! Sweeeet!
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That's a good tip to remember. Thank you, Frank!
:-)
Richard