Erik L. Arneson is a freelance writer and software developer with WordPress experience. He is located in Portland, Oregon. Jekyll 2026-06-18T15:03:10+00:00 https://arnesonium.com/feeds/wordpress-plugins.xml Erik L. Arneson Erik L. Arneson 2022-09-26T00:00:00+00:00 https://arnesonium.com/2022/09/wordpress-returning-404-errors <p>A WordPress website that I maintain was running into a problem. The most recently published post would periodically lose its permalink and return a 404 error. I tried to find a solution. <!--more--></p> <h2 id="save-the-permalink-settings-page">Save the Permalink Settings Page</h2> <p>The solution you see frequently mentioned for this error is to visit the settings page for Permalinks and save the settings again. From the WordPress admin dashboard, go to <strong>Settings &gt; Permalinks</strong> and click to open that page. Then scroll down and click <strong>Save</strong>.</p> <p>This worked <em>temporarily</em> for me. Something else was periodically causing the permalink for <em>only the latest article</em> to be lost.</p> <h2 id="finding-the-plugin-to-blame">Finding the plugin to blame</h2> <p>My next step was to examine all of the installed plugins, to see if something else was to blame. Since the problem was recurring periodically, I used the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-crontrol/">WP Crontrol</a> plugin to watch the various <a href="/2016/03/alternate-ways-to-call-wp-cron/">wp-cron jobs</a>. There were a lot of them!</p> <p>I immediately suspected the caching plugin. This WordPress site uses <a href="https://www.boldgrid.com/w3-total-cache/">W3 Total Cache</a>, which is a pretty sophisticated and large plugin with a lot of options. It provides a page cache, database cache, and a number of other caches which <em>seemed</em> like they could be responsible for the problem.</p> <p>I went through the W3 Total Cache settings, made sure they were up to date, and clicked <strong>Save</strong> on a few of the settings pages.</p> <p>The returning 404 problem seems to have stopped.</p> <p>What did I do to fix it?</p> <p><em>I don’t know.</em></p> <p>Sometimes WordPress is a pain to work with. This problem frustrated me for a week and I do not know what it was nor if it will return.</p>