Name: Disable Media Pages
Availability: InStock
Rating: 5 (17 reviews)
Author: joppuyo

Completely remove &quot;attachment&quot; pages for WordPress media. Improve SEO and prevent conflicts between page and image permalinks.

Disable Media Pages

<p>Completely disable &#8220;attachment&#8221; pages created by WordPress.</p>
<p>By default, WordPress creates a page for each of your attachments. This is can be undesirable because of two reasons:</p>
<h3>Search engine optimization</h3>
<p>Attachment pages don&#8217;t have any content, except an image, so they provide little value and can negatively affect your SEO because they are so-called <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/thin-content" rel="nofollow ugc">thin content</a>. Even worse, attachment pages may in some cases rank higher than your actual content pages which leads to a poor user experience.</p>
<h3>Reserved slugs</h3>
<p>Attachment pages can accidentally reserve slugs on your site. Let&#8217;s say you upload an image named <strong>contact.jpeg</strong>, an attachment page <code>https://example.com/contact</code> is automatically created. If you then try to create a page named <strong>Contact</strong>, the URL for that page will be <code>https://example.com/contact-2</code> which isn&#8217;t that great.</p>
<h3>How it works</h3>
<p>This plugin works by automatically setting all attachment slugs to an unique id, so they won&#8217;t conflict with your pages. If an attachment page is accessed, the plugin will set a 404 status code and display the &#8220;page not found&#8221; template.</p>
<p>You can also mangle any existing attachment slugs so they won&#8217;t cause any issues in the future.</p>
<h3>WP CLI support</h3>
<p>The plugin supports WP CLI.</p>
<h4>Mangle existing attachment slugs</h4>
<pre><code>wp disable-media-pages mangle
</code></pre>
<h4>Restore attachment slugs</h4>
<pre><code>wp disable-media-pages restore
</code></pre>
<h3>Note for WordPress 6.4</h3>
<p>WordPress 6.4 includes <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2023/10/16/changes-to-attachment-pages/" rel="nofollow ugc">a new feature</a> that allows you to disable attachment pages. However, this feature redirects attachment pages to the file URL instead of returning a 404 error. To completely disable attachment pages, you should use this plugin instead. The WP 6.4 feature also does not fix the issue where attachment pages reserve slugs for pages.</p>
<p>Also, there is not user interface to enable or disable media pages, they are automatically disabled for new sites but remain enabled for existing sites.</p>
<p>Because of these issues, I recommend you to use this plugin instead of the built-in feature. The plugin will be updated in the foreseeable future, at least until attachment pages are completely removed from WordPress core and older WordPress versions are no longer in use.</p>
<h3>Thanks</h3>
<p>Special thanks to Greg Schoppe for <a href="https://gschoppe.com/wordpress/disable-attachment-pages/" rel="nofollow ugc">his research</a> and inspiration that helped a lot with developing this plugin.</p>
<h3>Support the plugin</h3>
<p>Maintaining a WordPress plugin is a lot of work. If you like the plugin, please consider rating it on <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/disable-media-pages/reviews/#new-post" rel="ugc">WordPress.org</a>. You can also support me on <a href="https://github.com/sponsors/joppuyo" rel="nofollow ugc">GitHub sponsors</a>. Thank you!</p>
<p>If you are interested, you can also check out my other WordPress plugins:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/customizer-disabler/" rel="ugc">Disable Customizer</a></li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-drop-cap/" rel="ugc">Disable Drop Cap</a></li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/acf-image-aspect-ratio-crop/" rel="ugc">ACF Image Aspect Ratio Crop</a></li>
</ul>


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Initial Setup