How to Override the Slug or Page Permalink in WordPress

By Rebecca Markowitz • March 18, 2010 • 8 Comments

The Problem:

Recently, one of our clients wanted to change the slug, or permalink, from “about-2”, back to just plain ol’ “about”. I tried changing the slug from the “quick edit” mode. I tried to Edit the Permalink from the Post Page. No luck, it kept reverting back to about-2. After doing a few searches, I noticed that others had experienced this problem as well.

The Solution:

So, I finally found this post on the WordPress support forum which suggested I check the Trash folder. Sure enough, I found a page called “About” hanging out in the Trash. Once I permanently deleted the page from the Trash, I was able to save the permalink successfully.

Author: Rebecca Markowitz

Rebecca Markowitz has built over 100 WordPress sites for clients as Web Project Manager and WordPress specialist at illuminea. illuminea is a Jerusalem-based boutique web agency. WPGarage shows my dedicated relationship with WordPress over the years - full of love, laughs, tears, growth and strong drinks. L'chaim!

Susan

Yeah, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on that Trash folder. It’s also nice to run WP-Optimize once and awhile to clean things up.
Elio

Interesting. I ran into another issue regarding trashed posts. I was querying using SQL for certain posts and I was getting trashed posts. The thing is that there’s another value that the post_status attribute can have, ‘trash’. By excluding it while doing your SQL queries you avoid outputting trashed posts.
Jon

I’m having this problem too and I am not able to permanently delete the page “about”. There is no link for Trash that contains this page in the Edit Page screen. Is there another way to access the trash? the page still exists as I can put the url in the browser and it comes up, but I can’t find it anywhere. Thanks
- Gavin
  
  I had this problem, too. I had deleted all of the old versions of the About page and was still getting about-2 as the permalink name. It turns out my Home page had been given the slug “about” by default. Changing that to “home” allowed my to save the correct the slug on the About page.
AJ

Ever since WP added that trash bin it has tricked me out in many ways…I have also noticed that even when the post is in the trash you can still go to the url (no 404 error). This is a pretty nifty thing to know…because you can avoid errors and keep posts/pages “off” your site.
Walt Ribeiro

This post saved me hours of troubleshooting. Thanks so much! Was having this exact problem with my slug.
chris

YES thank you so much. I started having this problem a lot and no matter what couldnt figure out why. Thanks, your post was priceless.
Gouri

Yeah, I too had noticed this happening several times.. Sometimes it happens even when the category slug and tag slug are same..

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