<p><strong>Q: What was the request about? </strong><br>The problem was that whenever you try to go to an archive page(like /blog/page/2/), you'd be always redirected to the /blog/ page for no apparant reason. <br><br><strong>Q: How did you help with the request?</strong><br>We started with some of the most common ways to resolve such an issue. Since none of them helped, we moved on to less-likely but possible causes of the issue. <br><br><strong>Q: Any best practices & key learnings you can share?</strong><br>Here's a list of the most common ways in which you can debug an issue with redirects, or permalinks: </p><ol><li><span style="color:#696969">Go to <strong>Settings > Permalinks</strong><br>This should rebuild all of the WordPress permalink rules and undo any tampering that might have happened to them.</span></li><li><span style="color:#696969">Disable suspicious plugins.</span><ul><li><span style="color:#696969">Disable plugins through the WordPress plugins list.<br>Look at the list of your active plugins - if anything gives you a hint that it can deal with redirects or permalinks, try deactivating that plugin and see if the issue persists.</span></li><li><span style="color:#696969">Disable all plugins via ftp<br>This one's a bit more complicated(you need to have FTP/cPanel access to your site), but can be a better approach compared to the previous one. All you have to do in order to disable all of your plugins is just rename the /wp-content/plugins/ directory. Just change "plugins" to something like "plugins-disabled". This will prevent all of your plugins from loading(since WordPress can't find them anymore), but won't deactivate them(unless you go to the Plugins screen). This way you can see if the issue is still there. </span></li></ul></li><li><span style="color:#696969">Look in the .htaccess file at the root of your WordPress directory.<br>Again, you need FTP access for this one. Sometimes plugins(or developers), would leave behind some redirect rules in the .htaccess file, which can cause odd behaviour. For this one you need to be pretty confident and know what you're doing, since having incorrect .htaccess file <strong>will bring your site down</strong>.</span></li></ol>
