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Divi theme – wordpress delivers wrong page

Currently running WordPress 4.9.5 using the Divi theme with Permalinks set to use Post name, I can enter a url (page title/name) that does not exist on the site and WordPress will deliver a page that has the “filename” part of the url somewhere in the title/name of the page it delivers but is different than the actual url.

For example, if you go to http://space.nss.org/renew/
Instead of getting a 404, WordPress delivers the page http://space.nss.org/renewable-energy-partnership/

What on Earth is WordPress thinking?

What can I do to identify the exact nature of the problem and fix it?

Note that this behavior is not universal as I can enter bad urls (like space.nss.org/armstrong/) and do get the expected error page.

Thanks in advance, Jim.

NOTE: The url referenced above (space.nss.org/renew/) has now been fixed so its original behavior is no longer exhibited.

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  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER
    0

    With respect to my problem, it turns out that Wordpress is just trying to help by assuming that humans do not know how to type. When I type "space.nss.org/renew/" and Wordpress doesn't find an exact match, it looks for anything it can find containing the string "renew" and delivers what it considers to be the best match as a way of avoiding delivering a 404 page to the visitor.

    This feature can be turned off but there are consequences in that the 'redirect_canonical' is also responsible for resolving domain name issues (like www.domain.com vs domain.com). For reference, see https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/redirect_canonical

    Following are references on the subject I found once I knew what I was looking for.
    [https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/3326/301-redirect-instead-of-404-when-url-is-a-prefix-of-a-post-or-page-name]

    2 [https://serverfault.com/questions/776310/how-to-disable-the-automatic-redirection-in-wordpress-htaccess-file]

    3 [http://biostall.com/prevent-wordpress-redirecting-to-nearest-matching-url/]


  2. 0

    Looking at the network log it appears there is a 301 redirect placed on /renew to go to /renewable-energy-partnership

    As a solution you could remove the redirect so that it goes to the 404 page instead.

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