Diagnosing Redirect Issues

Your website is redirecting to different site or an internal page, or has a redirect loop

1. Clear the Cache

Inside your websites customizer in the caching tab and recheck your website – ideally in incognito mode as detailed below.

2. Check the Website in Incognito Mode

Check the site in an incognito window to rule out a browser issue with cookies or caching. If the site works correctly, clear your website’s browser cache.

3. Does the website have a Valid SSL?

If your website is loading over HTTPS but doesn’t have a valid SSL this can manifest in a few different errors. SSL related errors are much easier to pin down. Please see the troubleshooting steps in this counter-part article that details symptoms and causes for these errors:

Why do I see a different site than I’m supposed to, an SSL warning, signon.php, or too many redirects?

The above article covers the following:

1. The “too many redirects” error caused by Cloudflare
2. “Your session is finished” or a signon.php link
3. Website is insecure warnings
4. Your browser is trying to access a site without an SSL over HTTP and Nginx is returning the first website on the server that has one instead of your website

Number 1 is caused by Cloudflares flexible SSL setting, and 2, 3 and 4 are all easily solved by provisioning an SSL certificate.

4.1 Are The Database SITEURL and HOME Settings are incorrect?

If you’re being redirected to staging or a previous URL and routing for your domain is set to “None” (and not “root” or “www”), then you may have the incorrect address set within the database inside the wp_options table.

Previously, we used to strictly control these values. but so that third-party services such as Cloudflare APO, we now only control these values is when you specifically set either the root or www route type.

You can learn more about routing here:
Manage Site Domains and Site Routing (non www vs www)

To check, head to the Sites page inside your account, and open up PHPMyAdmin for your website by clicking the database icon:

Click through to the wp_options table:

Here make sure your siteurl and home are set correctly. If you need to edit them, simply click on the incorrect link to edit, and then press Enter when it is correct.

4.2 If it’s a multisite, check the wp_blogs table

If you’ve changed domains on a multisite, be sure to check the wp_blogs table.

5. Newly migrated website? Check for Two competing wp-config.php files

If things aren’t working the way they’re supposed to after migrating, and the above issues aren’t the cause, make sure that there isn’t a second wp-config.php file inside your websites /htdocs folder.

GridPane securely stores the wp-config.php file 1 level up outside of /htdocs here:

/var/www/site.url

If you have two wp-config.php files – 1 in the correct place, one in /htdocs – these can interfere with each other and cause problems. Please simply delete the wp-config.php file inside /htdocs if it exists, and leave ours in its place.

You can do this either by connecting to your server by SSH (links at the beginning of the article), or by connecting to your server over SFTP:

Connect to a GridPane Server by SFTP as Root user

To  delete them directly on your server,

you can navigate to your websites htdocs folder with the following command (switching out “site.url” for your websites domain name):

cd /var/www/site.url/htdocs

Then display the contents of the file with:

ls -l

And if you see a wp-config.php file, you can rename it with:

mv wp-config.php wp-config.php_off

Or you can delete it with:

rm wp-config.php

Once that’s done you’re all set!

6. Is there an Nginx configuration or .htaccess rule in place?

If you have migrated your website and you previously had a redirect setup in either an Nginx configuration file or .htaccess, then these settings will have carried over. Check and remove the redirects, then reload Nginx/OpenLiteSpeed.

7. Check Your DNS/CDN Configuration

Do you have any custom rules set up at your DNS provider or CDN that could be causing the redirect?

If you disable the Cloudflare proxy or your CDN, does the issue persist? You can also test this by bypassing them with a local redirect:

How can I edit my local hosts file to redirect URLs

Deactivating these will be necessary during an ongoing support ticket.

8. Do Permalinks need a refresh/reset?

We’ve seen migrations where the permalink settings have been changed. Check your settings are correct, re-save them, then clear the whole cache. Does this fix the issue?

You can flush your permalinks with the following command (replace site.url with your websites URL):

gp wp site.url flush permalinks

Then clear the cache either inside the UI or with this command: 

gp fix cached site.url

9. Check Your Plugins

At this point, it’s almost certainly a plugin within your website.

If you deactivate all plugins (rename the plugin directory via SSH or SFTP) does this fix the issue? If yes, rename the folder back to “plugins” and deactivate them one by one until you find the culprit.