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

Comments

2 responses to “Disable URL Guessing in WordPress”

  1. Jean Avatar
    Jean

    Hi Joseph,

    Thank you for coming up this piece of code, but unfortunately it didn’t seem to work for me.

    WP 5.7.2

    Thank you

    1. Joseph Dickson Avatar

      Thanks Jean. I’ll need to revisit this when I have some free time. Looks like the website that inspired this snippet is no longer online. 🙁

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