All permalinks to different pages on my WordPress site suddenly stopped working. Previously, we had it set up so that different pages used permalinks that described the page, much in the same way that you would for any site. The problem is that Google Analytics is set-up to use those links, and this sudden change is not only affecting the professionalism of the site, but also it's Google ranking and Analytics.
This change happened suddenly. My suspect was that a plug-in that affects this auto-updated, but now I'm not sure. Here's a list of everything I've tried to try and fix this.
- Settings > Permalinks: changed the permalink structure from Plain to Post Name, and back again to refresh the links. Nothing's changed. Changing the permalink structure breaks the navigation on the site however, as the navigation options switch to directing users to the correct slugs for each page, instead of the ?page_id= one, causing a 404 error.
- Changed .htaccess permissions from 644 to 666, as suggested in an article, through SFTP. Didn't make any difference, so I changed it back.
- Installed plugin Permalink Manager Lite, which also broke the navigation in the same way as changing the permalink structure does, but I did not find a fix there. The plugin is currently deactivated.
- Disabled each individual plugin, one at a time, and tried the website. Despite clearing the cache after each disabling, none of the plugins being disabled seemed to fix this issue.
We only use pages, no posts. Each page has a custom 'slug' under the Quick Edit in the Pages tab. Directly accessing any of these pages by putting the site domain and the slug into the browser now results in 404 errors. We have the following plugins installed:
- Akismet
- Code Snippets
- Contact Form 7
- CookieHub
- Elementor & Elementor Pro
- Filester
- GA4WP
- HTTP Headers
- Image Optimizer
- LiteSpeed Cache
- Meta Pixel
- Solid Security Basic
- WP Mail SMTP
- WPForms Lite
- Yoast SEO
Currently running WordPress version 6.8. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thank you.