Author: Joseph Dickson

Joseph Dickson is a front-end web developer with experience building higher education websites using ClassicPress, WordPress, and Drupal.

Disable URL Guessing in WordPress

Placing the following PHP code snippet below in your theme’s funtions.php file will disable a WordPress feature that attempts to automatically redirect a bad url to an actual post or page with a similar url.

Please note, if there are any broken links to your website or it’s pages that benefit from this feature it will now lead to a standard 404 error page.

/* Disable URL guessing - https://www.bloggersignal.com/stop-wordpress-from-guessing-urls */
add_filter('redirect_canonical', 'pz_no_redirect_404');

function pz_no_redirect_404($redirect_url)
{
    if (is_404()) {
        return false;
    }
    return $redirect_url;
}

The above was found in a post at https://www.bloggersignal.com/stop-wordpress-from-guessing-urls