WordPress Archives Dropdown Issue: Fixing the Homepage Redirect

Fixing WordPress Date Archive Dropdown Links That Redirect Oddly

If you’ve added a monthly archives dropdown to your WordPress site (via wp_get_archives() or a widget) and selecting a month sends visitors somewhere unexpected instead of the plain date archive, the cause is usually not the dropdown itself but something further down the request chain rewriting the URL. The most common culprits, roughly in order of likelihood:

• An SEO plugin’s redirect settings. Yoast SEO and similar plugins can be configured to redirect or noindex date archives entirely (Yoast SEO > Search Appearance > Archives), which can produce exactly this kind of unexpected redirect behaviour on date archive URLs.
• Permalink structure conflicts. If your permalink structure already includes a date-like segment, WordPress can sometimes struggle to distinguish a post URL from an archive URL.
• Caching. A stale cached version of the archive page redirecting from an old plugin configuration can persist even after you’ve changed the setting — clear your page cache (and any CDN cache) after making changes and retest in a private browser window.

Start by checking your SEO plugin’s archive settings first, since that’s the single most common cause of this specific symptom on WordPress sites.

Yoast SEO’s Settings Have Moved (Updated for 2026)

If you go looking for the setting described above and can’t find “Search Appearance” in the Yoast SEO menu at all, that’s expected — Yoast SEO 20.0 replaced the old flat Search Appearance page with a single consolidated Settings interface, organised into General, Content types, Categories and tags, and Advanced sections. The archive controls now live at Yoast SEO > Settings > Advanced > Date archives (with Author archives and Format archives as separate, similarly-structured sections nearby). The underlying lever is the same one described above — a show/hide-in-search-results (effectively noindex) switch for date archives — it’s just reached via a different menu path than the screenshots in this post show.