---
title: "WPML vs. SEOPress: Fixing a Home Page 301 Redirection Error"
author: "Alex"
date: 2020-05-12
lang: en
source: https://voneff.de/en/wpml-vs-seopress-fixing-a-home-page-301-redirection-error/
---

# WPML vs. SEOPress: Fixing a Home Page 301 Redirection Error

I encountered some strange behavior on a multi-lingual website today. The website was running [WPML](https://wpml.org/) for the multi-lingual functionality, and the different languages were set up to appear in subfolders such as `fancypants.com/ru` or `fancypants.com/fr`. The original language was shown on the base URL `fancypants.com`.

What was happening? Multi-lingual content on any sub-page or post was displaying just fine. The subfolder URLs such as `/ru` and `/fr` were redirecting to the base URL instead of showing the translated home pages, though.

## What did I do to eliminate the problem?

I did a number of things to get to the root of this, among others:

- Reset the permalinks → no effect
- Switched the home page to a different page to if the problem persisted → it did
- Deactivated the popular [Redirection](https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/) plugin → no change
- Used an online redirection checker tool like [redirect-checker.or](http://www.redirect-checker.org/index.php)g to find out what was happening → the translated home pages were really giving out a `301 redirect Moved Permanently` signal 😭
- Generated a new clean `.htaccess` file by first renaming the old one and then resetting the permalinks through the WP Dashboard → nothing to be gained here either

## What was the root cause of the problem?

Every so often, conflicts between plugins are causing problems. So, I went to through the rather monotonous process of deactivating all plugins and reactivating them one-by-one to see if the problem persisted. And with this, I finally found the culprit.

On the website in question, my go-to Yoast alternative [SEOPress](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-seopress/) was running (with the additional Pro version). SEOPress has its own redirection functionality but from my experience its performance and handling is inferior to the aforementioned [Redirection](https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/) plugin. Therefore, I never use it and just ignore it. Also in this case: there was no redirect setup here. But: the extension was active. SEOPress has this nice function where you can easily toggle various functions of the plugin on or off.

And the solution was really easy: I had to deactivate the “Redirections” functionality of SEOPress via its *Dashboard* and the unintended redirections of the multi-lingual home pages were gone. Bug or feature? I’d say: 🐛

**Have you run into similar troubles? Are you part of the WPML fanbase or do you rather despise it? Let me know in the comments!**

---

Update on 18 May 2020: SEOPress fixed this bug in version 3.8.6.2 of its Pro addon plugin. Check [the change log](https://www.seopress.org/changelog/) and make sure you update before writing any blog posts! 😂

---

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