Homepage redirecting to post

Hi,

This is actually already solved but it drove me nuts, so I thought I’d post it here to spare someone else the handful of tranquilizers…

A general note ahead: this only occurred on my local machine and only with Firefox. Enough to make developing hard and of course the same thing can happen on the production server.

So here’s the story
At some point I added a new redirection to a blog post that was imported from Drupal and that had quotation marks in the URL.
Don’t know if that’s an important detail, but from that day on, the homepage would always redirect to this post.
Similar incidents have been discussed in the past (e.g. https://wordpress.org/support/topic/why-is-my-homepage-redirecting-to-another-page), but none of the proposed remedies helped in my case. I even deleted all the redirections, the plugin files and db tables, disabled and removed other plugins – nothing. Also when I deleted the posting itself – the redirection would still be on, just resulting in a 404…

So yesterday I thought, let’s manually add a redirect from the post to the homepage. The worst that can happen is probably a browser crash when the redirections bounce back and forth.
But that didn’t happen. Instead – tada – I got my homepage back!

Next thought was of course how to make the post accessible again. Since I couldn’t think of any good solution I decided to see what happens when I delete the redirection again. Surprisingly it did not reactivate the homepage to post redirection, but just made the post accessible again. So the issue was resolved.

Makes me wondering how the redirection works. Maybe the plugin sets a browser cookie? Don’t feel like investigating now…

https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/