WordPress usually shows your most recent/sticky posts on the front page aka home page. The page is displayed when opening the root of your blog or by clicking the home button.

Missing Front Page

After creating a new page in WP and deactivating it I totally lost the front page of the blog. A click on the home button redirected (HTTP 301) me to the newly created and now missing page. Putting the page into the trash resulted in a 404 and when restored from trash it redirected to that page. But it never showed the regular recent posts front page again.

Identifying the culprit

A quick googleup revealed that I’m not the only one with that specific WP problem. And as most people suggested deactivating all themes and plugins may help I started doing so. (After trying some other weird stuff and just before looking into the db.)

Changing the theme back to default (or any other theme I’ve got installed) didn’t do anything. No luck here. Actually I’m feeling relieved, as the new iBlog theme looks very promising and didn’t cause any trouble since installation.

I hesitated a bit before disabling all the plugins (currently 26 installed / 17 active). So I opened the plugins page in two separate browser tabs and disabled them all together using one tab. Et voila, my home page was back! Checking in a third tab I could activate them one by one while peeking on the other browser tab.

So who was it? That damn “Redirection” plugin version 2.1.27 by John Godley. Apparenty it can monitor the changes of your posts and pages and autocreate 301 redirections when URLs change. Handy feature – if you keep that in mind. I’ve installed that plugin over a year ago and never encountered any problem. So I completly forgot about it.

The other bad thing was that “WP-reCAPTCHA” and “WordPress.com Stats” lost their API keys when being disabled and I needed to re-enter the public/private keys. Thanks to 1Password I didn’t have to look up any login/password and got my API keys back in seconds.

This always happens when you’re doing just a quick check before going to bed. Did cost me 2h of my life/sleep to figure that out. Damn Murphy…

Related posts:

1. Make WordPress plugin Contact Form 7 work with IIS
2. New hosting & domain change: Deluxe 4GH Linux plan at GoDaddy
3. Info: New theme, optimized for iPhone/iPod
4. How to fix Piwik web analytics not showing Google Pagerank anymore