Categories and permalinks

THNAKS!

Can you confirm if I set my permalink structure as:

/%category%/%postname%/

Then I shouldn’t be able to see my contents showing up at an URL that looks like this: http://www.mydomain.com/postname

correct?

Maybe a strange question but this is what’s happening to my site right now, so I m trying to figure out what I did wrong. Right now when I created this:

http://www.mydomain.com/category1/title1

the very same contents are also showing up at this URL below as well

http://www.mydomain.com/title1

Yes I have a cache plugins, maybe I will clear that and see what happens.

No, not receiving any htaccess error notices.

Out of curiosity, I checked other websites to see if this is a WordPress feature by design, am happy to see that the same thing happens to other websites also, so probably not a bug in my site.

Again, the issue is that I created the following post (as an example)
http://www.mydomain.com/category1/title1

and when visitors click the following URL without category in the URL

http://www.mydomain.com/title1

wordpress will automatically redirect visitors to the one that I created, ie: the one with category in the URL http://www.mydomain.com/category1/title1

I tried on other people’s website and it seems to be happening to other people’s websites too , see real life example here from another website:

https://beartproject.com/collections/high-school-2015/

If you access the above URL without the word “collections” like this

https://beartproject.com/high-school-2015/

you will be automatically redirected to the URL with category in the slug, ie:

https://beartproject.com/collections/high-school-2015/

I tested a couple other websites and it is the same.

This is very important, because to me it means that WordPress does NOT treat the following 2 URLs as 2 separate and different URLs

http://www.mydomain.com/category1/title1
http://www.mydomain.com/title1

It will have a huge impact on how I name and keep track of the filenames I use.