Permalink or slug is one of the most important entity of search engine’s ‘main food’ which they will prioritize and then index it for searching. A good slug or permalink may bring more visibility to search engines and that is what we already know about. But sometime we may had trouble in updating permalink or slug, even after we delete the page or post in WordPress. Let see how we can fix this..
The Problem
- Let say we have created a page, named for example About (slug also named about). Suddenly we change our mind and delete it.
- After sometime, we decided that we saw the necessity of the page and recreate a page with the same name and slug.
- However, the result returned name About but the slug became about-2. Even after several time editing and renaming (even deleting also), still return the same value.
Have you ever faced something like this?
The Solution
I know the solution is quite easy for most people especially those who are wordpress savvy. 🙂 This is quite useful for newbie like me..
- Go to your wordpress Pages menu, you will surely find something like ‘All‘, ‘Published‘, ‘Draft‘ (if you have draft saved) and ‘Trash‘.
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- The solution is in ‘Trash‘. Click it and you will see the original about slug and permalink. This is all where your deleted pages will go into.
- Hover onto it, select and click ‘Delete permanently’.
- Now, you can create or edit the un-edited slug about-2 page into about page.
Problem fixed! Enjoy!
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Thank you!
Thanks a lot! That’s really useful!! 🙂
what happens to me is if i put a slug name with just a number is like, lets say mydomail.com/777 will rewite it as mydomail.com/777-2 then i tried with any number and it ads the -2 for some unknown reason wont allow me to use any number without the -2
Go check again in the trash. There must be a copies of page with that slug name. Delete it all first and plan on what slug you want to keep.
I promise there is nothing left in the trash i did checked a gazillion times cuz i’ve been there before. So what I did was starting creating pages with just numbers just for curiosity and any of them will put a -2 after it, the only way it won’t put the -2 is if i include a letter on the name
Excellent – thanks! Worked a treat. Other forums said you have to do some mad tweaking in MySQL or PHPadmin or something or another…
thanks.. ill try..
it doesnt work for category slugs, even if I have removed them permanently
It may be you category slugs have been taken by tag slugs. Check if you have a tag and category with the same name.
This worked perfectly for me! Thank you so much!!!!!!
this did not work for me. neither did editing the permalink and clicking update before you click ok in the edit page. It always changes back. what can I do?
 It changes back from previous permalink or from a numbered permalink (eg:mydomail.com/777-2)? It could be the current permalink that you want to use has been taken by previous permalink. Previous permalink was not properly trashed (deleted). Check your trash. If that does not work. You could always check database if that is the final way. I suggest you use WP-Optimize plugin. This plugin can check if there is unused post revision, auto-draft post, and at the same time optimizing your database content.