Wordpress has a feature whereby it will automatically redirect your URLs if it percieves them to be written wrongly. Here is an example: I have a page called my-page
If I go to:
www.mysite.com/something/my-page/
it will immediately redirect me to
www.mysite.com/my-page/
as nothing exists at the first URL.
How can I turn this feature off, and instead just get a 404 if incorrect URL's are typed in?
You can disable permalink guessing for 404s without disabling redirection of canonical URLs by adding the following line somewhere in your code (eg. in functions.php):
add_filter('do_redirect_guess_404_permalink', '__return_false');
Relevant functions in the Wordpress code are redirect_canonical and redirect_guess_404_permalink in wp-includes/canonical.php.
As Ash suggested, you can turn off the feature by using the following code:
remove_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');
In looking at the redirect_canonical function in canonical.php, it would appear you can also modify the behavior with your own filter.
At the end of the redirect_canonical() function, there is a call to filter the final answer:
$redirect_url = apply_filters( 'redirect_canonical', $redirect_url, $requested_url );
So you could write your own filter to modify the final redirection or return null to stop the redirection, based upon the input, thus turning off the feature for a particular URL or a subset of URLs.
This worked for me:
remove_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');
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