Broken Links that WP Fixes

Hi there! 👋

Let me start with making it clear that I certainly do not expect a fix for this, but figured I’d share something I just experienced when generating a static site in case a) someone else runs into it, or b) you happen to have an idea for fix.

I noticed that some links were broken in the static site, that seemed to work fine in the live site. I traced it down to the fact that WordPress was “fixing” the links live, which of course the static site was unable to do.

Example:

Imagine there’s a page at mysite.com/foo/bar/cat/
If you have a link on your WordPress site to mysite.com/cat/, WordPress will figure out what you actually meant and redirect the visitor to /foo/bar/cat/. Of course, the static site won’t do that dynamic fixing for you, so it’s broken on the static site.

I believe that, under the hood, WordPress uses redirect_canonical to determine the final URL to send a reader to. Not sure if there’s any opportunity to do similar while generating the static export to update links to use the same “where wordpress would have taken them” or not, but figured I’d throw it out there.

Cheers and thanks for reading!