Wordpress has a feature whereby it will automatically redirect your URLs if it percieves them to be written wrongly. Here is an example: I have a page called my-page

If I go to:

www.mysite/something/my-page/

it will immediately redirect me to

www.mysite/my-page/

as nothing exists at the first URL.

How can I turn this feature off, and instead just get a 404 if incorrect URL's are typed in?

Wordpress has a feature whereby it will automatically redirect your URLs if it percieves them to be written wrongly. Here is an example: I have a page called my-page

If I go to:

www.mysite/something/my-page/

it will immediately redirect me to

www.mysite/my-page/

as nothing exists at the first URL.

How can I turn this feature off, and instead just get a 404 if incorrect URL's are typed in?

• redirect
• urls
• 404-error
• rel-canonical

• If you watch what is happening (via HttpFox or WireShark or a similar packet sniffer), those pages redirect with a 301 Status-- Moved Permanently-- which is appropriate behavior. It helps search engines keep their databases up to date among other things, and the redirect helps users find pages. This may effect how WordPress handles things when you actually do move a page or change a permalink, so be careful. Anyway, your choice but I am not sure it is a good idea. – s_ha_dum Commented Nov 8, 2012 at 15:04
• I know it's a good thing, I do understand that. However, I have a particular use case where I did not need that behaviour. I am developing a plugin which handles URL redirection and so I want to override that behavior. – Mazatec Commented Nov 9, 2012 at 11:28
• Here is a more correct answer: link – Binod Kalathil Commented Dec 19, 2014 at 10:54

3 Answers 3

This worked for me:

remove_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');

As Ash suggested, you can turn off the feature by using the following code:

remove_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');

In looking at the redirect_canonical function in canonical.php, it would appear you can also modify the behavior with your own filter.

At the end of the redirect_canonical() function, there is a call to filter the final answer:

$redirect_url = apply_filters( 'redirect_canonical', $redirect_url, $requested_url );

So you could write your own filter to modify the final redirection or return null to stop the redirection, based upon the input, thus turning off the feature for a particular URL or a subset of URLs.

You can disable permalink guessing for 404s without disabling redirection of canonical URLs by adding the following line somewhere in your code (eg. in functions.php):

add_filter('do_redirect_guess_404_permalink', '__return_false');

Relevant functions in the Wordpress code are redirect_canonical and redirect_guess_404_permalink in wp-includes/canonical.php.